[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#760790: FTBFS: fork bombs the buildd

[Adam Borowski]

Package: src:libtecla
Version: 1.6.1-5
Severity: critical
Justification: fails to build from source (but built successfully in the past)

Hi!
I'm afraid that libtecla FTBFS in an extremely unpleasant way, killing the
buildd machine unless you somehow limit memory available to the build (AFAIK
none of popular package build tools has this capability).

A build attempt goes:
* dh_auto_clean
* an endless recursion of 'make' processes, until pids are exhausted.
  By default on linux, there's 32k available pids.
* if there's at least 15GB memory+swap, the build succeeds!  No error
  is returned that fork failed, it just unwinds and continues.
* otherwise, the OOM killer starts shooting processes, with each make
  taking   only very little space thus being unlikely to be selected.
  This ends up   with the machine the buildd is running out scoured clean
  of any bookkeeping processes, leaving ony libtecla makes...


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: armhf (armv7l)

Kernel: Linux 3.8.13.23 (SMP w/4 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash