hi notmuch people-- debian/control's build-dependencies list a bunch of things that i think are only relevant for running the tests (e.g. dtach -- and maybe emacs and bash-completion and other packages). These should be marked <!nocheck> so that dpkg-buildpackage can know to ignore them when trying to build with BUILD_DEB_OPTIONS=nocheck. This is called a "build profile", if you want to look up more about it: https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec https://bugs.debian.org/757760 I'd send a patch, but i'm not entirely sure which packages are strictly for the build-time tests, so i hope someone with more experience with the debian package can mark them appropriately. Thanks! Regards, --dkg