how to stop variants from propagating down to dependencies

[Ken Cunningham]

I thought I would install the new openal-soft with the gui with the tests as well.

sudo port -v install openal-soft +gui +tests

I did not already have cmake or qt5 installed on the 10.7 system I was using.

Running the above command installed cmake from source with the +gui option, as no binary exists for that, and then started to install qt5-qtbase with the +tests variant until I aborted that.

I installed qt5-qtbase separately, without +tests, using the buildbot binary, and then when I installed openal-soft +gui +tests I got what I wanted.


So — I guess there is no way around this automatically? 

I didn’t want cmake +gui, nor did I want qt5-qtbase +tests, much less the several hours it would have taken to install them, plus all the build deps — but you’d have to know what was happening, abort the build, install the deps first, and then retry your openal-soft install to fix this, and not many people would understand that I think.

Is the other option, that variants do not propagate to dependencies, so much worse? I guess for +universal it has to propagate down, but for other variants, is it needed?

Ken