TPF Devel::Cover grant report July 2013

[Paul Johnson]

[ My apologies for not getting this report out in a more timely manner. ]

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly
report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering July 2013.

This month I released Devel::Cover versions 1.05 and 1.06. The releases
contain a number of patches and pull requests along with various little
cleanups and other small fixes.

The rest of the work this month was spent on p5cover. This is the project to
get test coverage of the perl core and the core modules. The perl.gcov
Makefile target was recently removed from the perl core so I needed to update
the p5cover code slightly. I also improved the p5cover process, but there is
still work needed here which I am hoping to get completed soon. The 1.06
release was purely the facilitate the p5cover work.

As I mentioned in June's report, I'm still heavily involved in other work, so
I wasn't able to invest much time in Devel::Cover for July.


Closed Github tickets:

63 cpancover: Errors in write_csv()
54 Test fails when coverage enabled

Merged pull requests:

65 Typo fix
64 Correct errors in write_csv().
53 Improve -coverage options, fix -ignore_re for .gcov files

Closed RT tickets:

#34888 Fix pod coverage for multiple packages in a file.

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

Hours worked:

16.07 1:30
17.07 6:30
18.07 1:45

Total 9:45

Total hours worked on grant: 284:55

[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 2013.

+1,
Thanks, Paul!

Post by Paul Johnson
The rest of the work this month was spent on p5cover. This is the project to
get test coverage of the perl core and the core modules. The perl.gcov
Makefile target was recently removed from the perl core so I needed to update
the p5cover code slightly. I also improved the p5cover process, but there is
still work needed here which I am hoping to get completed soon. The 1.06
release was purely the facilitate the p5cover work.

Can you give me the 50¢ explanation of how to benefit from p5cover? What do I
run, what else must I do? A link to a README is plenty fine for this answer.
Thanks!

[Paul Johnson]

Can you give me the 50¢ explanation of how to benefit from p5cover? What do I
run, what else must I do? A link to a README is plenty fine for this answer.

I'm not sure that it makes much sense for people to try to run p5cover
at the moment unless they are interested in helping to develop it. Of
course, I'm always grateful for such help. The (not up to date at the
moment) repo is at https://github.com/pjcj/CoreSmokeCoverage. If
anyone's interested in that, give me a shout.

And in general, I'm not sure whether core developers will want to run
p5cover themselves either. It takes quite a while. But I'll aim to
make it easy if anyone does want to.

I more envisage a regular run of whatever happens to be in blead at the
time, with the results made available for anyone to look at. That's
currently found at http://cpancover.com/blead/latest/coverage.html which
is linked from the bottom of cpancover.com.

You'll notice that a number of core modules don't appear there. I'm not
completely sure why that is at the moment.

And I'm not really sure what a 50¢ explanation is, so I hope I've
guessed correctly.

[Ricardo Signes]

And I'm not really sure what a 50¢ explanation is, so I hope I've
guessed correctly.

Perfect, thanks!

[James E Keenan]

Post by 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 2013.

+1,
Thanks, Paul!

Post by Paul Johnson
The rest of the work this month was spent on p5cover. This is the project to
get test coverage of the perl core and the core modules. The perl.gcov
Makefile target was recently removed from the perl core so I needed to update
the p5cover code slightly. I also improved the p5cover process, but there is
still work needed here which I am hoping to get completed soon. The 1.06
release was purely the facilitate the p5cover work.

Can you give me the 50¢ explanation of how to benefit from p5cover? What do I
run, what else must I do? A link to a README is plenty fine for this answer.
Thanks!

As I suggested in my lightning talk at YAPC::NA::2013 in Austin, p5cover
would be very useful in identifying untested areas in the Perl 5 core
distribution that could then become the focus of work by people not yet
active with the Perl 5 Porters. If we held more events of the
"distributed hackathon" model (St Louis, Nov 2012; New York, Mar 2013),
we would need areas for people new to hackathons to work on -- and
writing tests for parts of the core distro easily fits the bill. For
that reason, p5cover is something that I could see us running on the
following bases:

* After each annual .0 production release, using the increase (we hope)
in test coverage as part of our promotion of the new version.

* After maintenance releases, to make sure we don't slide backwards.

* After monthly dev releases (by people other than the release manager),
to check our pulse.

... but I wouldn't see running it on blead. The people currently
concerned with blead have more than enough to do already. I recommend
using p5cover as a way to bring people into P5P as a human project
rather than as simply a way to strengthen the codebase.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan

[Christian Walde]

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 2013.

+1, thanks. :)