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

[Eric Gallager]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 1:58 PM Ken Cunningham
<ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Various ports implement a “test” or “tests” variant to allow extra features and deps required for testing to be enabled.
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> This variant, when requested, will propagate up the chain to all the ports, however.  There is no real use case where someone would desire the test/s variant to propagate up.
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> This generates needless builds, and often enables features people neither need nor want, and then guarantees manual rebuilds, forever, of the involved ports.
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> I recently came back to a massive building project involving clang and llvm when I was trying to build “mesa +tests”. Because clang-15 and llvm-15 also have a “+tests” variant, and had not yet been installed, port was building those (and possibly others) with the tests variant rather than use the prebuilt binary.
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> Of course I just aborted the huge llvm/clang-15 build, cleaned them up, and installed them separately. But others would probably not know to do this.
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> I had suggested a few years ago we might namespace the test/tests variants, by having a convention that the portname be prepended to the test variant, to be more specific and avoid this — but not a widely acceptable idea at that time. So we’re still in the same situation…
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> Is it possible that a “test” or “tests” variant might not be propagated up the ports chain by base, instead?
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> K
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> PS. A similar thing happens with “+debug” variants, another common variant that you *usually* don’t want propagated up to *every single port* in the chain either.
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> This one is occasionally something that people would want up their chain, but it is so fragile of a plan to rely on variant propagation (ie if you have the port installed already, it won’t be reinstalled with the “+debug” variant), that such rare users might best install each port they want to be installed as “debug” do that specifically. Certainly most of us don’t want clang-15 installed with it’s debug variant when you’re trying to debug some little port.

I wonder if this is what's tripping me up in 65981:
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65981