[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#848589: snap-aligner: Build requires 188 GB of memory (fortunately not used, just allocated)

[Santiago Vila]

Package: src:snap-aligner
Version: 1.0~beta.18+dfsg-1

Hello Andreas et al.

Building this package allocates 188 GB of memory.

To see how this could be a problem, take a machine with a lot of
memory, say, 64 GB of RAM, which btw is more than three times the
amount required to build any other Debian package, and disable memory
overcommiting by creating /etc/sysctl.d/10-no-overcommit.conf with
this contents:

vm.overcommit_ratio = 100
vm.overcommit_memory = 2

Then write "sysctl --system" to load those values.

Then try to build this package in such machine, and it will fail.

It is normally assumed that applications overcommit as a normal
thing, but this package builds fine in a machine having as little
as 1 GB of RAM, so the overcommit ratio is about 188:1.

Maybe this package does actually require such high amount of memory to
work, but as far as building is concerned, every other Debian package
which I know (well, except gpgme which requires 230 GB, the only other anomaly
I found) could be built with only 20 GB of RAM, so this package is
really an outlier.

Thanks.