The Summary more or less speaks for itself. I've been working around the problem for a long time and it's still a minor annoyance, present in all versions. Basically, if I ran `ebuild ... test install' I would expect two phases, namely src_test() and src_install(), not three. Apparently having test as argument triggers some internal will-do-some-testing mechanism that works precisely like `FEATURES=test ebuild ... install', because then src_test() is run as well.
Thanks, this is fixed in git now: http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=9ba323ca58c1ab47f20b1ca46073e5e938997385
This is in 2.2_rc68, but I'll leave this bug open until it's in an unmasked version.
This is fixed in 2.1.9.