Nilesh Patra <nil...@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.