R 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 both fail their test suites

Hi Uwe,

 >> have tried running the test suite in a build that's configured with
 >> '--without-recommended-packages'?

 >
 > Of course this fails in the case when we check for the recommended packages:
 >
 >   | < character(0)
 >   | ---
 >   | > [1] "Matrix" "nlme"   "mgcv"
 >
 > If Matrix et al are not there, they can't be reported to be there, of
 > course...

maybe that test could be made a little bit smarter to deal with the
seemingly legit use-case of passing --without-recommended-packages?