See my post at http://blog.flameeyes.eu/articles/2008/06/11/please-dont-build-your-examples-by-default . It would be nice if gtkmm avoided building tests when the user has FEATURES=-test. By the way, the examples USE flag is useless, it builds examples and demos but those _are not installed_, thus it only waste the users' time as the compiled code is discarded right away. I'd suggest getting rid of the USE flag.
I know about the tests, cairomm is also affected by the same bug (see bug #224187) This is on my todo, I just need to get around to actually doing it :)
Hope you don't mind if I actually file bugs or these issues :) This way you are reminded of them in your TODO, and I'm sure they won't be overlooked :)
Actually I hadn't noticed that gtkmm was affected too. So yeah, if you have more nitpicks like this, keep filing bugs :) I'll try to do another gnome-mm bug fixing spree Real Soon (tm)
reported upstream in: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538226
Fixed in CVS with a minor caveat. FEATURES=test will install 4 of the test programs' code into /usr/share/doc. This bug has been fixed in trunk and gtkmm 2.13.x no longer has that issue. Since it's only a few simple C++ files, it's not really bothering me. If anyone really wants it fixed, I can backport the patch, but I just don't see the point.
and for the record, this was the current behavior and nobody had noticed/cared until now :P