'Cannot allocate memory' during autopkgtest

[Graham Inggs <ginggs@debian.org>]

Hi R People

Since the upload of R 3.5, the autopkgtests of r-bioc-biovizbase and
r-bioc-cummerbund have been failing in Ubuntu where the test runners
have less than ~2GB RAM.

In both cases, the autopkgtest consists of generating the
documentation from a .rnw file.  The last step in the .rnw file is a
call to sessionInfo() which seems to run out of memory while trying to
execute 'uname' to determine the platform, as follows:

> sessionInfo()
Error in system(paste(which, shQuote(names[i])), intern = TRUE,
ignore.stderr = TRUE) :
  cannot popen '/usr/bin/which 'uname' 2>/dev/null', probable reason
'Cannot allocate memory'
Calls: source ... withVisible -> eval -> eval -> sessionInfo -> Sys.which
Execution halted
Warning message:
system call failed: Cannot allocate memory

I don't believe this failure is a reflection of the quality of the
r-bioc-biovizbase and r-bioc-cummerbund packages, and the following
workaround does the trick:

--- a/debian/tests/run-unit-test
+++ b/debian/tests/run-unit-test
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ cp -r /usr/lib/R/site-library/$oname/ext
 cp /usr/share/doc/$pkg/examples/vignettes/* $ADTTMP
 find . -name "*.gz" -exec gunzip \{\} \;
 for rnw in `ls *.[rRS]nw` ; do
+sed -i '/^sessionInfo\(\)/d' $rnw
 rfile=`echo $rnw | sed 's/\.[rRS]nw/.R/'`
 LC_ALL=C R --no-save <<EOT
   Stangle("$rnw")

Would there be any objections to me making this change in the Debian
packaging of r-bioc-biovizbase and r-bioc-cummerbund?
codesearch.debian.net suggests there may be other affected packages,
but either the documentation is not generated as part of the
autopkgtest, or the autopkgtest has never passed.

Regards
Graham