Permission: Variations Publish
The permission 'variations-publish', if present on your system will control which ProcessWire Admin users can publish or unpublish variations configurations. A user without the permission will not be able to publish or unpublish variations configurations. This permission is not relevant to attributes.
Please note that this permission is not created when the module is installed. To use it, you will have to create it first then assign it to a role(s) which in turn are assigned to users, in the normal ProcessWire way.