Re: [RFC] gcov tool, comparing coverage across platforms

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 11:41:04AM -0700, ransom@cs.pdx.edu wrote:
> We are a group of undergrads at Portland State University who accepted 
> as our senior capstone software engineering project a proposed tool for 
> use with gcov for summarizing gcov outputs for a given piece of source 
> code tested on multiple architecture/OS platforms. A summary of the 
> initial proposal is here:
> http://www.clutchplate.org/gcov/gcov_proposal.txt

It seems that you may be imposing a restriction on your tool that puts
an unnecessary limitation on its usefulness.

What you are really producing is a mechanism to combine information from
gcov reports, that allows attributes to be placed on the gcov reports.
You have identified one possible attribute: the architecture/OS platform.
But that's only one possibility.

Remember, gcov produces one report per .o file.  But that .o file might
be linked into many different possible programs.  If you were testing
something Gnome or KDE, you might be interested in which lines of code
in libraries are touched by calls from which user applications, for
example.  A software development project might want to know which lines
are hit only by unit tests, and which are actually used by the full
application.  The list goes on.

The thing is, you don't need to do any additional work to handle this
more general application, just be less restrictive about what the
property means that you are calling "architecture/OS platform".