My own personal opinion has been that +test/+tests and +debug, by default, should not propagate through the chain of dependencies; and then perhaps there might be some way to enable propagation (maybe with a command line option?).
However, if I recall correctly, all variants propagate through the dependency chain, so it might be difficult to make certain variant keywords behave differently? -- Jason Liu On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 1:58 PM Ken Cunningham < ken.cunningham.web...@gmail.com> wrote: > Various ports implement a “test” or “tests” variant to allow extra > features and deps required for testing to be enabled. > > 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. > > This generates needless builds, and often enables features people neither > need nor want, and then guarantees manual rebuilds, forever, of the > involved ports. > > 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. > > 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. > > 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… > > Is it possible that a “test” or “tests” variant might not be propagated up > the ports chain by base, instead? > > > K > > > > 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. > > 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.
