Hi Alessandro, yeah some tests would be an improvement. Preferrably, and as you already outlined the easiest way for all of us, would be to convince upstream to include the tests in the source releases. Since it's also vacation season right now this will likely also have to wait on my end a bit.
Beside of hand rolled orig tarballs, or a big tests patch, maybe shipping a second orig tarball with only the tests is an option. I never used the capability of dpkg-source to rely on several orig tarballs in the form of an additional e.g. exfatprogs.orig-tests.tar.xz. So not sure if that is suitable and which other pitfalls that would introduce. Sven
