We're discussing removing the MAHOUT_LOCAL option in order to trim artifact sizes.
If you think keeping the option to use MAHOUT_LOCAL for testing with the single-node mode of Hadoop is important please let us know. It can be handy for trying things out but it would be nice to ditch the effort required to maintain it. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-1705 for more context. Thanks!
