Re: it might be useful to be able to enable specific configure commands only when running tests

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 18, 2020, at 17:37, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> 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.

Not possible. The phases are independent. When the configure phase runs, it has 
no idea whether or not the test phase will be run later.

it might be useful to be able to enable specific configure commands only when running tests

[Ken Cunningham]

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