Bug#742242: please provide a simple way to run simple tests locally without upgrading the system.

[Charles Plessy]

Package: autopkgtest
Version: 2.10
Severity: wishlist

Dear Martin, Ian and everybody,

I like autopkgtest, but the need to use either a virtual system or treat the
local system as if it were virtual raises the bar quite high.

I have some simple tests that do nothing else than running the upstream
tests, which themselves are very simple.  I would be very happy if there
were a command that would take a source package as input and do nothing
else than running the tests declared in debian/tests/control.

More in particular, my problem is that the command “adt-run package.dsc ---
null” needs root access and is very invasive on the local system, while I only
want to run the tests on binary packages that I have freshly installed, on my
local system as it is.

Having such a facility would tremendously boost my capacity to write
autopkgtests that do not fail.  As you have noticed in some reports that you
made on packages maintained by the Debian Med team, currently it takes a couple
of round trips to figure it out, and on my side it is caused by the strong
difficulty to test the tests in a trivial way.

Have a nice week-end, and thanks for your work on autopkgtest !

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan