having the "+test" or "+tests" variant propagate causes unexpected builds

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Oct 30, 2022, at 11:42 PM, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder if there was consideration given way-back-when to the idea of having NO propagation of variants at all.

It was an intentional design.

> Anything you wanted to apply to every port, you would put in variants.conf. Otherwise, your variant applied to the port you were currently installing, and that is it.

The behavior predates variants.conf

> To me — that makes quite a bit of sense, actually…might solve a lot of problems.
> 
> But I’m sure some scenario arises where it was needed.

Maybe? We could probably figure out what depends on the current behavior and then decide whether to change it or not.

Back in the beginning, we didn't really know how much to use or not use variants and over time we've (ab)used variants for a lot more than just enabling or disabling a set of features on a given port.

-- 
Daniel J. Luke