Why does magento try to compile inactive themes?

[Eddcapone]

Summary (*)

I have two themes, company_base and company_fresh. I am only using company_fresh and company_base is just laying around atm.
If I execute php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy then I often get errors from my inactive corrupted experimental theme company_base for example:

Compilation from source: /home/company/company.de/app/design/frontend/company/base/web/css/source/lib/extend/catalog/product/view.less
variable @dunkelgrau is undefined in file /home/company/company.de/var/view_preprocessed/pub/static/frontend/company/base/de_DE/css/source/lib/extend/catalog/product/view.less in view.less on line 6, column 16
4|     .h {
5|         font-family: os-semi-bold;
6|         color: @dunkelgrau;
7|         margin-bottom: 20px;
8|     }
9|     /* Mixins End ------------------------------ */

Why does magento even try to compile it?

Examples (*)

Create a second theme beside your active one and make a mistake in a LESS file in it, on purpose, so that it will thrown an error.
Then call php bin/magento setup:di:compile && php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy.
You should see an error during the compilation.

Proposed solution

Ignore inactive themes.

---

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[m2-assistant]

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[hostep]

@Eddcapone: quick fix - execute bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy --theme=company_fresh

I'd strongly recommend you to read the help so you are aware of all possible options of that command: bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy --help

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed after 14 days if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[m2-assistant]

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[ihor-sviziev]

Hi @Eddcapone,
As @hostep said, by default Magento executes static content on all themes. If you want to deploy only one theme - you can just specify it.

In addition to that recently we introduce a way to deploy then only the needed theme, without all parent themes in #30090. AFAIK this change still not included in a stable release, so you could wait for the next release OR apply it as a patch.

As we don't have any issues there that need to be fixed - I'm closing this issue.