[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#853113: spades: Fails to build with unhelpful error message in a "low" memory machine

[Santiago Vila]

> […]
> > To reproduce please try to build this on a single-CPU machine having
> > 2 GB of RAM and 2 GM of swap.
> 
> Indeed I am unable to reproduce this on my small VM. Building succeeds for me, see attached build log (done with cowbuilder instead of sbuild though).
> Looking at the error message, it looks like something in the after-build tests fails, and TBH my first guess wouldn’t be low memory at first either.
> 
> I wonder if you would be able to help by trying a rebuild on your low memory machine to confirm the build failure happens reproducibly for you in low memory conditions?

I actually tried many times. I've put all the build logs (both failed
and successful) here in case you find them useful:

https://people.debian.org/~sanvila/build-logs/spades/

As a summary, this is the number of times the build succeeded on each
machine where I tried:

  20 skywalker2
  18 yoda1
  17 skywalker1
  15 yoda2
  12 e7
  12 e3

Here, yoda{1,2} and skywalker{1,2} have currently 6 GB of RAM and 4 GB
of swap. e3 and e7 had 4 GB of RAM each.

And this is the number of times the build failed on each machine where
I tried:

  11 e16
  10 linode1
   9 linode2
   3 e13
   2 e5
   1 bdj1

All those machines had 2 GB of RAM and similar amount of swap.

I know, by looking at /proc/meminfo, that spades needs 2GB of memory
to build, so I admit that this is pushing the limits.

But remember that it's not the fact that the build fails what I'm
reporting here (each package needs what it needs), but the unhelpful
error message where I can't find "out of memory" anywhere in the build
log.

In case you need it, my build environment is described here in detail:

https://people.debian.org/~sanvila/my-building-environment.txt

Thanks.