Maybe MacPorts could introduce the concept of ‘test dependencies’ (dependencies only required for running tests). I work with Apache Maven quite a bit, and apart from build and runtime dependencies (which MacPorts already distinguishes) it also supports declaring test scope dependencies, that don’t need to be installed until tests are actually run: https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Dependency_Scope
Nils. > Op 30 okt. 2022 om 11:23 heeft Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> het > volgende geschreven: > > On Oct 28, 2022, at 21:33, Daniel J. Luke wrote: >> >> I don't think implementation difficulty is the barrier here - but that all >> variants should just have the same behavior. >> >> In my mind, the real problem is the need for +test variants, there should be >> a way to just use the test phase - and perhaps changes to base/ to enable >> that are a better option. > > In one of my ports that has a tests variant, the reason why the variant > exists is that the build system looks for certain test dependencies at > configure time. If they're not there, it doesn't build the test suite and > doesn't allow tests to be run later. I'm not sure how MacPorts could be > improved to handle that better in the absence of a tests variant. Would you > have MacPorts do the configuration in the configure phase, do the build in > the build phase, and then redo the configuration and build in the test phase? > Or would you suggest in this case that the test dependencies that are needed > at configure time should be added unconditionally, so that even users who > won't be running the tests need to install them? In my port's case the > dependencies are probably small and that wouldn't make much of a difference, > but I'm not sure it'll always be that way for all ports. > >
