[Python-modules-team] Bug#919929: python-scipy: autopkgtest fails intermittently

[Drew Parsons]

Package: python-scipy
Followup-For: Bug #919929

Something weird going on with the scipy tests.  There's a clue in this
bug report already: "MemoryError".

Fails are now consistent since 25/2/2019.  The funny thing is, even
when I try to access the test log for the last successful
migration-reference (10/2/2019) at
https://ci.debian.net/data/autopkgtest/testing/amd64/p/python-scipy/1902804/log.gz
accessing that log crashes my browser tab.

Maybe there's just too much output from deprecation warnings, so all
available memory is being used up, crashing the tests.  The gzipped
log file is 3.4 MB, which is not so large really. Are there memory
limits on debci tests?

Downloading with wget and reading from the filesystem, it's reporting
an excessive amount of the repeated warning from numpy: 
  /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/matrixlib/defmatrix.py:71: PendingDeprecationWarning: the matrix subclass is not the recommended way to represent matrices or deal with linear algebra (see https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/numpy-for-matlab-users.html). Please adjust your code to use regular ndarray.

Could be an argument for allowing scipy 1.2.1 into unstable and testing?
(assuming scipy 1.2 has had matrix handling updated)

But probably a better resolution in the context of the release freeze
is to instruct pytest to ignore PendingDeprecationWarning. Certainly
the warning is obfuscating further inspection.