TPF Devel::Cover grant report Week 4

[Paul Johnson]

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the report for
week 4 of my work on improving Devel::Cover.

This report covers 09.06 to 15.06.

I have released Devel::Cover 0.89 including most of the work detailed
below.

I have spent some time this week 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.

Then I continued with the task of working through the existing RT and
github tickets.

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.


Closed RT tickets:

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:

09.06 5:05
12.06 2:15
13.06 2:10
14.06 3:55
15.06 1:50

Total 15:15

[Paul Johnson]

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the report for
week 5 of my work on improving Devel::Cover.

This report covers 16.06 to 22.06.

I wasn't able to spend much time on Devel::Cover this week.

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 this week, and Devel::Cover passes all
its tests with it.

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

Hours worked:

16.06 0:15
20.06 0:15

Total 0:30