TPF Devel::Cover grant report July 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 July 2012.

This month I released Devel::Cover 0.90, 0.91 and 0.92.

I wasn't able to spend as much time working on Devel::Cover this month
as I had hoped to. The time I did spend was primarily on working
through RT and github tickets, resolving those I could and merging pull
requests.

RT 62423 concerns Devel::Cover failing its tests when it is built in a
directory containing spaces, which appears to be the default when
building with cpan on OSX. I couldn't build on OSX, but I did fix
things up so that Devel::Cover should now work in directories which
contain spaces. (But if you prefer your life to be easier, i suggest
you don't do that.)

I made a change I've been considering for quite some time, which is to
get the @INC directories from perl itself.

At build time we put the @INC directories in @Devel::Cover::Inc::Inc so
that we will be able to ignore them by default at runtime. That works
well normally, but sometimes the build environment differs from the run
environment which can result in default coverage of core modules.

The solution is to shell out to perl and ask it what its @INC is. Of
course it's not quite that easy.

And shelling out isn't very nice, but when the new V module for
introspection is in place we can use that instead.

I knew this was a risky commit, but cpantesters didn't show any
problems. Nevertheless, I had broken things for people using
local::lib. Thankfully, Olivier Mengué noticed and patched it up for
me.

I also fixed up a n earlier change I had made which made all the tests
fail on Windows. Devel::Cover itself still worked, but almost all of
the tests didn't. Christian Walde's cpantesters smoker detected the
problem quickly and we diagnosed the problem together on IRC. So I
eventually got around to installing Perl on Windows (which turned out to
be pretty simple) and then it was just a matter of getting the quoting
such that both *nix and Windows were happy, and hoping that other
platforms work too.

(On which note, does anyone use Devel::Cover on anything other than *nix
and Windows?)

As usual, I made other various fixes and updates.


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

Closed RT tickets:

75565 cover -test fails Writing HTML output on Windows
62423 Devel::Cover 0.73 tests fail due to unescaped path
57173 Devel::Cover 0.66 is causing Moose constraint failures
70115 "malformed JSON string" errors when gcov2perl is ran for XS distributions
39162 Devel::Cover test 't/at2.t' failure
38765 1 test fails (acond_branch.t) on Cygwin 1.5.25 / Perl 5.10
38453 Devel::Cover - Use of uninitialized value in sprintf
68991 t/e2e epic fail when prefix for perl is not the physical location
76528 Devel/Cover/Inc.pm contains temporary install destination DESTDIR
66881 Symlinked directories can cause ignore functionality to fail
37349 /usr/local/* ommitted in Inc
32345 Devel::Cover 0.63 fails 1 test under Perl 5.8.7, Ubuntu 6.06

Closed Github tickets:

23 RE list with spaces doesn't work
24 protect slashes on windows
25 Fix inc directories when working with local::lib

Merged pull requests:

24 protect slashes on windows
25 Fix inc directories when working with local::lib

Fixed cpantesters reports:

http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/251a6589-6ef1-1014-92c1-140f3373d4b5
http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/d50bb259-6bf5-1014-86c6-f8fbafede0e8
http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/675f887f-6fa2-1014-9b4e-081b3373d4b5

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

Hours worked: 25:20

Total hours works on grant: 88:50

[Ricardo Signes]

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 July 2012.

Thanks Paul, +1.