It might be helpful if there was a configure command in the portfile that was only enabled when “port test” was run.
Specifically, for example, something that would enable the following command: configure.args-replace --disable-tests --enable-tests only when tests were being run. I realize at present this is usually done with a test variant. That is OK, but as we have seen, it often propagates that test variant down the entire dependency tree, which can be a pain and is almost always not what you want. For now, I suppose I can work around that issue by calling the test variant “portname_tests” or something similar. Ken