Due to the weird way that python handles relative imports, the test needs to be run in it's own directory. Similar to how source lists are done, I would have made a list of devtools tests. But, it wasn't clear how to iterate over that list in order to cd into the directory that each test is contained in (or even if automake supports this sort of looping behavior). If there's a better way to future-proof this for multiple tests, let me know.

Thanks. Even knowing what to look for, this was not easy to Google around for.

There is something integrated in autotool ot run tests. Use it.

I did it this way due to the way python handles imports. Python normally expects imported modules to reside in sub-directories. Currently, a majority of the python code lives in test/functional/*. While it would be ideal to move the shareable test framework code into the src tree, the tests would no longer be able to import it correctly. Even more ideally, all of the python tests + python devtools would move under a common directory structure. Considering the harm this would do to the backporting effort, I opted not to take this approach. The approach done here is intended to be short-term until the test framework backports are in order.