how to stop variants from propagating down to dependencies

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Dec 31, 2019, at 10:34 AM, Ken Cunningham <cunningham at medicalrounds.com> wrote:
> On 2019-12-31, at 7:26 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>>> 
>>> Except that would get the rdeps of openal-soft with its default variants, rather than with the +gui and +tests variants.
>> 
>> That's what I understood Ken was trying to do.
> 
> I think Ryan means that if the "test" variant of openal-soft had a dep on, say, ghostscript, you wouldn't get that.

You wouldn't get them installed without +gui +test, but you would get them when you installed openal-soft +gui +tests (which ends up being close to what you wanted).

> There is just no good way to fix this -- unless we were to decide that a certain set of named variants, like "tests" or "docs" or "gui" , would not be propagated down. Or conversely that only a certain set of named variants are propagated down (like "universal" and -- any others?).
> 
> Probably too much trouble.

I think it is - in my mind the correct solution is to just avoid the use of variants wherever it's reasonable.
-- 
Daniel J. Luke