TPF Devel::Cover grant report June 2012

[Paul Johnson]

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly
report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering June 2012.

This month I released Devel::Cover 0.88 and 0.89.

I looked into https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Public/Bug/Display.html?id=113464
which is a perl bug, but is related to warnings when running
Devel::Cover. I supplied a core patch to quieten the warnings which
has been applied, but I also changed Devel::Cover to turn off warnings
when calling code in B::Deparse since the consensus seems to be that we
probably have better things to do with our time than ensure that
B::Deparse is warnings free.

I spent some time on cpancover. I received some feedback from my
initial work with suggestions for improvements, which I implemented. I
also automated the process of generating the coverage run with a view to
running it once or twice a week from cron. Perhaps it could even run
daily now that I have also compressed the results and configured nginx
to serve those.

At the moment the most recent results are found at
http://cpancover.com/latest/index.html which is redirected to from
http://cpancover.com but I need to come up with a main page linking to
the available versions and perhaps some way of keeping links alive for a
reasonable amount of time.

It would also be nice to get something like Thomas Klausner's
App::ArchiveDevelCover (https://github.com/domm/App-ArchiveDevelCover)
running to track coverage changes to modules. I have got many more
ideas, but they are for another day.

I also tested Devel::Cover against 5.17.0. I had some cpantesters
failure reports against 5.17.0 but I was not able to reproduce them, so
I will need to look further into that.

I looked into perl #113690 and #113684 which were about perl commit
6a31dbf44ee919c340a3372c95b28d581979d165 breaking Devel::Cover 0.89.
This commit removed some superfluous parentheses from B::Deparse output
which caused Devel::Cover output to change and hence tests to fail.

I had planned to fix this as soon as perl 5.17.1 was released, but
Father Chrysostomos realised that the fix was incomplete and needed
further work to get the precedence levels correct. So he reverted the
change and suggested I wait until the complete fix is committed.

As to why I was planning on waiting until 5.17.1 was released before
fixing Devel::Cover, perl is a moving target as far as Devel::Cover is
concerned and I choose to only worry about stable releases since 5.6.1
and development releases with version numbers above the most recent
stable release. Arguably, that's already too many versions, but it's
not causing a problem at the moment.

As expected 5.17.1 was released, and Devel::Cover passes all its tests
with it.

And since I've started working on this grant a few people have
approached me with ideas and suggestions, and with offers of help. This
is great and something I had hoped would happen. So I have also spent a
little time discussing these things and making future plans.


The work I have completed in the time covered by this report is:

Closed RT tickets:

75633 Directory names with ++ not supported
77598 [PATCH] Fix test failures when the build directory contains regexp metacharacters.
77599 [PATCH] POD errors
61515 Cover.pm messes with cwd
70162 cover fails with spaces in pwd
69562 cpancover won't run without Parallel::Iterator

Closed Github tickets:

16 cover -coverage documentation
17 #line directives
19 Add some math modules
21 Add links from subroutine/branch etc reports to the main report file
22 Database permissions

Github tickets worked on:

18 Seems to hang on C file

Merged pull requests:

19 Add some math modules

Fixed cpantesters reports:

http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/370c28c8-a3ef-11e1-b57c-2d415ba78cfe

You can see the commits at https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover/commits/master

Hours worked: 21:20

Total hours works on grant: 63:30

[David Cantrell]

Post by Paul Johnson
I spent some time on cpancover. I received some feedback from my
initial work with suggestions for improvements, which I implemented...
At the moment the most recent results are found at
http://cpancover.com/latest/index.html which is redirected to from
http://cpancover.com but I need to come up with a main page linking to
the available versions and perhaps some way of keeping links alive for a
reasonable amount of time.

Ooh, shiny!

Feature request: some way of easily seeing just my dists.

[Paul Johnson]

Post by David Cantrell

Post by Paul Johnson
I spent some time on cpancover. I received some feedback from my
initial work with suggestions for improvements, which I implemented...
At the moment the most recent results are found at
http://cpancover.com/latest/index.html which is redirected to from
http://cpancover.com but I need to come up with a main page linking to
the available versions and perhaps some way of keeping links alive for a
reasonable amount of time.

Ooh, shiny!
Feature request: some way of easily seeing just my dists.

Post by Paul Johnson
TODO

I can't promise when I'll get around to it, but I do have plans for
extending cpancover. However, this work is fairly well decoupled from
the core of Devel::Cover, so if anyone has any free time and is looking
for a project I'd be very grateful for assistance.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's worth a try.)

[Ricardo Signes]

Post by Paul Johnson

Post by David Cantrell
Feature request: some way of easily seeing just my dists.

TODO

I can't promise when I'll get around to it, but I do have plans for
extending cpancover. However, this work is fairly well decoupled from
the core of Devel::Cover, so if anyone has any free time and is looking
for a project I'd be very grateful for assistance.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's worth a try.)

I'd love that feature, too. Where's the repo again?

[Paul Johnson]

Post by Ricardo Signes

Post by Paul Johnson

Post by David Cantrell
Feature request: some way of easily seeing just my dists.

TODO

I can't promise when I'll get around to it, but I do have plans for
extending cpancover. However, this work is fairly well decoupled from
the core of Devel::Cover, so if anyone has any free time and is looking
for a project I'd be very grateful for assistance.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's worth a try.)

I'd love that feature, too. Where's the repo again?

The repo is at https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover

The interesting files are:

https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover/blob/master/utils/run_cpancover
https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover/blob/master/utils/install_modules
https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover/blob/master/utils/cpanmcover
https://github.com/pjcj/Devel--Cover/blob/master/bin/cpancover

I trust you're only asking to save others from having to do so ;-)

If anyone just wants to add modules to cpancover, install_modules is the
file to patch.

Otherwise run_cpancover is the top level shell script, cpanmcover makes
symlinks to the cpanm build directories, and cpancover is the one that
does all the work.

cpancover is currently a proponent of the self-documenting code
paradigm, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

[Mark Keating]

Did this get signed off yet?

Regards

Mark

Post by Paul Johnson
In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly
report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering June 2012.

Thanks, Paul! +1
--
rjbs