Re: variants question

Unfortunately there's no simple, standard way to tell what variants one might want for any given port. It would be nice if MacPorts showed more context on a variant, but as far as I can tell, it's up to the given port maintainer. Sometimes when I'm faced with a similar question, I'll look at the actual port file to see if I can ascertain what a variant is doing:

cat `port file subversion`

"port cat subversion" might be easier.