how to include correct variant when using arduino-esp32 as component?

[ecc esp]

I found that the reason my sketch worked with the Arduino environment, but not when compiled as an esp-idf project with arduino-esp32 as a component, was that the Arduino IDE was correctly including variants/<MY BOARD>/, but arduino-esp32/components.mk only includes variants/esp32/.

What's the preferred way to override this behavior without modifying the arduino-esp32 source ? (I'd rather leave that untouched so it tracks upstream correctly.)

[ecc esp]

I'm currently making this work by moving variants/esp32 out of the way and making it a symlink to variants/<MY BOARD>, but I'd like a less kludgy solution.