The following was posted at
http://2013.qa-hackathon.org/qa2013/wiki?node=Achievements, but I
figured that it should be posted on-list as well.
##########
At the 2013 Perl QA Hackathon in Lancaster, England, testing
coverage-related issues were handled by several participants, including
the following:
Paul Johnson (pjcj)
Jim Keenan (kid51)
Dinis Rebolo (drebolo)
Abe Timmerman (abeltje)
... with remote assistance from Thomas Klausner (domm). The work had
two major focuses:
1. cpancover: Improving reporting of testing coverage data on major
CPAN modules, expanding on pjcj's cpancover.com.
2. perl5cover: Creating a mechanism to run coverage analysis over the C
source code and Perl libraries in the Perl 5 core distribution and to
make that analysis available.
cpancover
The purpose of the hackathon's work with respect to cpancover was to
integrate cpancover with metacpan -- specifically, to place a link on a
distribution's metacpan page pointing to the appropriate page in cpancover.
perl5cover
perl5cover will have two major aspects: one centralized, one distributed.
First, a centralized server will run a coverage report on the Perl 5
core distribution shortly after each release of a major (5.18.0) or
minor (5.17.11) version of Perl. The coverage will use 'gcov' to report
on the Perl 5 source code written in C and Devel::Cover-based tools for
the Perl libraries (.pm files) which ship with the core distribution.
At any point in time, a limited number of recent releases of major and
minor versions will be displayed as web pages. However, plain-text
versions of the coverage summaries will be retained indefinitely and be
available for download.
Second, we will make available, probably in the form of a CPAN module,
instructions showing how to run a coverage analysis on the core
distribution at any commit.
If you are obsessed with how well covered the code in blead is at any
moment in time, the second approach will be the better approach for you
-- but you will have responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure.
If however, your objective is to identify inadequately tested parts of
the Perl 5 core distribution and contribute appropriate, new tests to
the test suite, then the first approach will be better. Our philosophy
will be "KISS"; we'll try to get a basic, not-difficult-to-maintain
infrastructure up soon. We'll worry about adding bells and whistles later.
This work will build on domm's App::ArchiveDevelCover, but we will
probably end up creating one or more new CPAN distributions to achieve
this. The hackathon saw a lot of work as well on the creation of a
stand-alone program to run coverage of the core.
Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
