[Rd] R 3.5.0 fails its regression test suite on Linux/x86_64

[Peter Simons]

Hi Dirk,

 > I have been doing for R for about 20 years (if you count the time I
 > assisted Doug Bates when he was still the maintainer) (and longer for
 > Debian), and you seem to follow the same model we set up years ago of
 > splitting the content of r-recommended (itself a virtual package) off
 > r-base-core.
 >
 > You simply need to do this in stages.

I have packaged free software for 20+ years for many different distributions,
and, in fact, I'm doing that professionally these days as an employee of one of
the largest commercial Linux distributors. So please trust my expertise when I
tell you that this is not what I want.

What I want is

  ./configure --without-recommended-packages && make && make check

to succeed without error, and I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

I have reported these kind of errors before in past, and back then a friendly R
developer simply took a moment to disable the offending tests when the build
was configured with this particular flag and that solved the problem. I would
hope that this is the outcome we can achieve this time, too.

If no-one wants to make those changes for whatever reason, then that's fine and
I'll just disable the test suite in NixOS to make the build succeed. I feel like
that would be a sub-optimal solution, though.

Best regards,
Peter