Possible freeze exception for autopkgtest

[ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk (Ian Jackson)]

autopkgtest 2.2.2 is currently in sid but was uploaded before the
freeze and AIUI will be subject to the blanket freeze exception.
I would like to ask your opinion about about possible exceptions for
further changes to autopkgtest for wheezy.

autopkgtest has no rdepends.  The spec documment in its source tree is
an output consumed by other parts of the project but not via the
archive.  It is possible that bugs in autopkgtest might relate to only
certain packages, and make it difficult to test those packages with
autopkgtest, but the packages themselves would remain unaffected.  So
the risk for other packages and bad interactions is low.

I think best best chance of improving the use of autopkgtest in wheezy
is by making it more functional.

Of course another approach would be to ask users who wanted, after
wheezy is released, to use a better autopkgtest test runner would be
to ask them to install the version from sid or testing.  This wouldn't
be very hard as I don't expect in the lifetime of wheezy to introduce
changes that would make it hard to use the sid version on wheezy.

Things I think would be useful to get into wheezy are:

 #678359  autopkgtest: Depends: @ only works when building the source

     This is a pretty significant bug and really needs IMO to be
     fixed.  I'm tempted to declare it RC.  There is a patch
     available, which looks good, and I intend to accept it (after
     double-checking and testing it myself).

     With your approval, I intend to make an upload to fix this soon -
     after 2.2.2 has propagated to testing.

 #648148  autopkgtest: Support running as user

     This would be something that would be very nice to have.  It
     would enable users to run autopkgtest directly in wheezy without
     needing root.  There is no design or patch for this yet.  I will
     consider how best to implement it.

     Supposing I were to have a this ready for upload by (say) three
     weeks from now, would it be a candidate for a freeze exception ?
     If so then I will make this a priority.

     Of course there is a risk that this will introduce bugs.  If
     those bugs don't get fixed in time it might be necessary to
     revert the change by reuploading the previous version with a new
     (higher) version number.  This would be a simple operation which
     I'd be happy to authorise anyone to do, or to do myself.

Thanks for your attention.  Let me know if there's any more
questions you have.

Ian.