To clarify how WebKit came into the discussion: WebKit was mentioned by
William Grant above merely as an example of a more-or-less worst-case
compilation that still manages to fit inside 4GB memory;  I pointed out
that WebKit like other ordinary desktop software is not a good reference
for build requirements because complex scientific software is vastly
different, and also that 32-bit build environments can be ignored for
this package.

It's actually not true the module is a mishmash of other projects; its
aim is simply to provide an octave interface for shogun, which is
extremely useful for scientific computations. The very large build
requirements are actually not unusual for complex scientific software.
Ubuntu and Debian communities have no other examples of this kind of
very large-scale complex scientific software, so experience of how to
manage the compilation requirements is limited, and hearing the
requirements sometimes causes consternation at first. Experience from
similar commercial software such as Matl@b, however, is that very large
build requirements are real and normal for such necessarily complex
software. It would be a pity if the first and only example of very
large-scale complex scientific software to appear in the Debian and
Ubuntu communities were excluded forever because of a trivial issue like
a memory limit (and anti-thrashing check).

As you explained, the buildd servers manage memory allocation in a
standard way that works for most compilations, but there are exceptional
cases such as this package where it always fails. You said there is no
way in the current software of restricting the builds onto larger VMs.
It would be great if buildd could do that. Where is the best place to
make a support request?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1090819

Title:
  libshogun-dev upgrade impossible - shogun-octave missing due to 4GB
  out-of-memory compilation error

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