I'm running across this too now. I think part of the problem is that pybuild invokes unittest discover by default, but this isn't how paramiko's test suite is actually run, at least if you go by what's in the tox.ini file.
This gets me closer: diff --git a/debian/rules b/debian/rules index 9c04662..8d5d25b 100755 --- a/debian/rules +++ b/debian/rules @@ -1,6 +1,7 @@ #!/usr/bin/make -f export PYBUILD_NAME=paramiko +export PYBUILD_TEST_ARGS={interpreter} $(CURDIR)/test.py %: dh $@ --with python2,python3 --buildsystem=pybuild @@ -11,3 +12,5 @@ ifeq (,$(findstring nodocs, $(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS))) endif dh_installdocs +override_dh_auto_test: + PYBUILD_SYSTEM=custom dh_auto_test But I'm still seeing two failures and two errors: ====================================================================== ERROR: test_K_utf8 (tests.test_sftp.SFTPTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/tests/test_sftp.py", line 171, in tearDown sftp.rmdir(FOLDER) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 390, in rmdir self._request(CMD_RMDIR, path) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 729, in _request return self._read_response(num) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 776, in _read_response self._convert_status(msg) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 806, in _convert_status raise IOError(text) IOError: Failure ====================================================================== ERROR: test_L_utf8_chdir (tests.test_sftp.SFTPTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/tests/test_sftp.py", line 679, in test_L_utf8_chdir sftp.mkdir(FOLDER + '/' + unicode_folder) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 380, in mkdir self._request(CMD_MKDIR, path, attr) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 729, in _request return self._read_response(num) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 776, in _read_response self._convert_status(msg) File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/paramiko/sftp_client.py", line 806, in _convert_status raise IOError(text) IOError: Failure ====================================================================== FAIL: test_K_utf8 (tests.test_sftp.SFTPTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/tests/test_sftp.py", line 675, in test_K_utf8 self.fail('exception ' + str(e)) AssertionError: exception Failure ====================================================================== FAIL: test_O_getcwd (tests.test_sftp.SFTPTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/tests/test_sftp.py", line 734, in test_O_getcwd self.assertEqual(None, sftp.getcwd()) AssertionError: None != u'/' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 148 tests in 34.596s FAILED (failures=2, errors=2)