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

[Santiago Vila]

Package: src:spades
Version: 3.9.1+dfsg-1

Dear maintainer:

I can't build this package on a machine with 2 GB RAM and 2 GB swap.

This is usually not a problem by itself, because each package needs
what it needs, and therefore this bug is not severity serious as FTBFS
bugs usually are, but it is a problem in this package because of two
reasons:

* Looking at Committed_AS in /proc/meminfo during the build, the
package does not seem to need more than 2GB of RAM in either case.

* There is not a clear message saying "Memory exhausted" or
"not enough memory" or anything like that.

I attach two different build logs. The one called "ok" was made
on a machine with 6GB of RAM and 4 GB of swap. The one called "notok"
was made on a machine with 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap.

Please take a look at the second build log and try to determine how
anybody is supposed to know that there was not enough memory from the
build log.

(Well, maybe the package is actually doing something weird with the
memory and maybe it should work after all).

To reproduce please try to build this on a single-CPU machine having
2 GB of RAM and 2 GM of swap.

[ Note: In the subject of this bug I've used "low" memory between quotes
  because 2 GB of RAM is not actually so small. Among the 17209 source
  packages that may be built with "dpkg-buildpackage -A", 17089 of them,
  that is, 99.3% of them, need less than 2 GB of RAM to build ].

Thanks.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: spades_3.9.1+dfsg-1_amd64-20170129T004745Z.ok.gz
Type: application/gzip
Size: 61869 bytes
Desc: 
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/attachments/20170129/57764e7b/attachment-0002.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: spades_3.9.1+dfsg-1_amd64-20170129T004422Z.notok.gz
Type: application/gzip
Size: 31638 bytes
Desc: 
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/attachments/20170129/57764e7b/attachment-0003.bin>