It is by design. Some tests will fail if you don't have iconv, also.
From the manual:
Failures are not necessarily problems as they might be caused by missing
functionality, but you should look carefully at any reported
discrepancies.
and that option is not even documented in the manua
Hi,
just for information:
On Suse 10.3 x86
> make check
fails,
if configure was called with --without-recommended-packages
for the latest beta.
The problem I stumbled upon is located in utlis. Here comes the relevant part
of utils-Ex.Rout.fail in R-2.7.0/tests/Examples
> ### ** Examples
