Nilesh Patra <nilesh@debian.org> writes:
When I want to fix autopkgtests for a package on a particular architecture, I currently
see no way to run autopkgtests before I dput since porter boxes do not provide root
access which autopkgtest needs.
Currently I am manually hacking around the test scripts and running the autopkgtests but
this does not emulate the autopkgtest environment well enough. It also does not work
well for daemon-like packages for instance.
Related, we wouldn't need to use the porterboxes if the
situation for running autopkgtests locally was better.
I have complained at length on IRC on the difficulties of running
autopkgtests locally on non-amd64 architectures. There is some tooling
to build images for e.g. the qemu backend, but in my experience it does
not work smoothly. I think the autopkgtest maintainers could use help
with improving this tooling. Personally I am reluctant to add non-amd64
autopkgtests to packages with the current state of tooling. I do not
consider "upload and find out" an acceptable debugging strategy.