Whitelist "test/" directory in Arduino library specification

[Ian Katz]

Goals of this topic:

• Primary: establish whether this request falls under "a simple enhancement" that should be reported directly as a GitHub issue.
  
• Secondary: determine the extent to which unit testing is supported as a part of Arduino library development.
  

Background:

Originally posted as a forum topic: I've developed a system called arduino_ci that enables you to run automated tests on Arduino libraries, both locally and remotely (as part of a service like Travis CI). Among other things, this includes abilities such as

• Fully simulating the physical world (e.g. clock, pin inputs, serial inputs, etc)
  
• Testing against multiple boards with no hardware present
  
• TAP-formatted test output
  

In addition to the writeup I did on StackOverflow, the project README is fairly up to date and I have a few working examples (Arduino-Queue, Adafruit FONA) to show it in action.

Issue:

Right now, I'm storing unit tests in a directory called test/ to align with library layout for other languages.  I'd prefer not to think of them as "extras" to a library, and for that reason I'd like to ask that the test directory be whitelisted in the library specification.  I have no preference as to whether unit tests are run using my system (which is admittedly in beta) or literally any other unit testing system.  I also have no absolutist preference like "all libraries should be tested".  My goal is only to have an accommodation for proper testing of a software library, if desired by a library developer.

Side benefits to the community:

The purpose of the CI library I wrote is purely to enable collaborative development on GitHub -- the ability to accept pull requests from total strangers without having to download / compile / flash / test the code yourself. 

What threshold of benefit would I need to surpass in order for such an addition to be considered?

Thanks for your time.