Cannot compile a non-created canister

[vporton]

Building canister is possible only after it's created. That's wrong, because the user may want for example receive WASM code of canister (e.g. for later installation, as I do in my IC package manager) without actually creating the canister.

This is especially bad on production where creating canister requires to spend funds.

I tried the following:

$ dfx new --no-frontend --type motoko build-bug
$ cd build-bug
$ dfx build build-bug-backend
Error: Cannot find canister id. Please issue 'dfx canister create build-bug-backend'.

I expected to see this happen: building the canister.

Instead, this happened: canister cannot be built.

Meta

dfx --version:

dfx 0.20.0-icsystemtest.0+rev636.dirty-76457e03