I am currently writing automatic tests for dialer-app (lp:~canonical-platform-qa/dialer-app/call-tests), and soon for messaging-app. To run these in our CI machinery without depending on particular hardware we need to run ofono with phonesim. That's a non-trivial thing to set up, and requires root. We figured that the best thing was to create a new binary package "ofono-phonesim-autostart" or similar which would ship an upstart job that sets up ofono and phonesim on installation and tears it down again on removal (or "sudo stop ofono-phonesim"). With that, the actual tests would not need to run anything as root and just need to specify that new package as a test dependency. That way it is equally easy to add autopkgtests to packages which want to test some phone-y bits.
I ask for an FFE to put a new "with-ofono-phonesim" shell script into ofono-phonesim (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~canonical-platform-qa/dialer-app/call-tests/view/head:/tests/with-ofono-phonesim) and create above new binary package with just the upstart job. This is *not* meant to be installed by default on any image of course, it should just be available in universe.
Approved, go nuts.