Missing local paths config in development

[gareth]

As I understand it, require.js' paths config lets you create local aliases and prefixes for local dependencies.

However, the requirejs_include_tag helper only makes the paths config available in the rendered javascript, if that path is an absolute URL (or an array of fallback URLs)

If I want my modules to depend on jQuery and have that linked to this correctly versioned file, I'd expect to be able to use config like this:

paths:
  jquery: 'jquery-1.12.0'

…but (as described above) this config never makes it to the browser. What am I doing wrong?

I should note that, if I remove the if condition from the line I linked above then I do see the config rendered and everything works properly, but I guess there must be some other reason for that condition to be there, I just don't know what it is.