Currently, in_tree API mode is used also when running tests from installed RPMs, which:

• does not make much sense and actually does not test scenarios relevant to live deployment

• requires unnecessary manual configuration prior to running the tests (population local .ipa directory for example) where a single kinit and then running ipa-run-tests should be sufficient.

It would be nice if the tests run from RPMs used a proper API and in_tree mode would be used only when... well, running tests in source tree.

There are several ways how to implement this. Just to name a few options, we can:

• add CLI options to ipa-run-tests to enforce/disable in-tree mode

• add some sort of heuristics to detect whether we are running the command from source tree and guess the API mode from this

• use ipa-run-tests only for out-of-tree testing, and use the good old ./make-test script only for in-tree testing