How to set up a development environment

First of all, it is recommended that you create an lxc container, since the following steps will make changes in your system. And since some build types will only work with virtualized containers, creating an lxc vm is the best way to go. If you just want to run the test suite, creating a container is sufficient.

You can create a container with the following command:

lxc launch --vm ubuntu:20.04 lp-builddev

Note that you may want to have a profile to share the source code with the container before running the above command.

Then, inside the container, install the necessary dependencies:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:launchpad/ppa
sudo apt-get update
cat system-dependencies.txt | sudo xargs apt-get install -y

This should be enough for you to be able to run the test suite via make check.

More information on how to integrate it with Launchpad can be found here: https://dev.launchpad.net/Soyuz/HowToDevelopWithBuildd