Debian now has autopkgtest (http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep8/), that are very useful to detect e.g. when a dependency update breaks a package, or when runtime dependencies are missing. Ideally one would write real integration tests meant to be run against the installed package, but a first step when adding autopkgtests for a given package is often to simply run the existing upstream test suite against the installed package.

I've tried copying the @test@ directory out of the source tree and to run @test.py@, but in the current state of things it doesn't work: the test suite hardcodes things like @../mat@ and @../mat.desktop@. Would it be possible to fall back to the location where these files are installed, whenever the test suite detects it is not running from inside the source tree?

(from redmine: created on 2015-08-20, closed on 2015-12-30)