Re: [Cobertura-devel] Congratulations on a great project... and some questions/suggestions.

[Mark D. <ma...@ki...>]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 11:33:49 +1000, Nathan Johns wrote
> Would it be possible to change the class list in the bottom left 
> frame to be sorted by name rather than the whole classname & package 
> similar to javadoc.  It looks a little strange with the entire class 
> list being grouped and sorted by package but the package name not being
> displayed.

Yes, I didn't even realize it was like that.  I'll try to change that tonight.

> We were also keen to see some reporting on inner classes.  I have
> noted that a patch has been made to address this and I will try it 
> out shortly.  (Having spent most of this morning making our own 
> modifications to support inner classes in the html report, it will 
> be interesting to see this patch and how it is implemented.)

I haven't had a chance to look at the patch yet, but I'd like to release 1.3
soon after the inner class issue is resolved.

> Another thing that the my fellow developers were disappointed with 
> was the loss of line counts from the html report as compared to the 
> jcoverage report.  Were they removed for specific reasons and are 
> there any plans to put them back?  Given the wide variation of line 
> counts in our source and packages it give a better perspective of 
> coverage when shown a percent and what number of lines that 
> percentage is over.

Hmm, yeah.  I'll add that to the list of "things to add to the HTML reports if
you can find a goodp lace to put it."

> I also noted while looking at the code that method statistics are
> collected as well (hope I am correct in this).  Perhaps as an
> enhancment to the class overview pages which include the source, an
> additional section could be put at the top breaking the source file
> down by method.

That's a good idea--and very possible.

> I would also like to see the ant tasks improved to allow the location
> of the 'cobertura.ser' file to be specified.  Currently we have to
> move this file manually in our ant script between the instrument,
>  unit testing and reporting parts as they all look for the file in different
> locations. This is probably due to the complexity of our build not
> cobertura but having this flexibility would be good.

I agree completely.  I think I even filed a feature request for it so I
wouldn't forget.  (We also manually move the cobertura.ser file in our ant
scripts.)

> Can I also ask why cobertura ant tasks delegate to another JVM to run
> cobertura?  While this may be a hangover from jcoverage, to me it
> would make more sense to have the ant task just delegate to the
> cobertura classes directly.  The main methods on the cobertura entry
> points could be retained for those who wish to run it directly from
> the command line.

I came to the conclusion that it's a licensing issue.  Most of Cobertura is
GPL, but the ant tasks are Apache Source License, and the two licenses are
incompatable.  So for the ant tasks to call code from the rest of Cobertura
they must invoke a new JVM.  I belive that ant is also licensed under the
Apache Source License, so I do not think it is possible for an ant task to be
GPL.  Why the jcoverage people didn't choose a more appropriate license for
jcoverage (like ASL for everything)... your guess is as good as mine.

> Thanks for all the good work that is being put into cobertura.

No problem.  Thanks for the excellent feedback.  It's all very insightful and
polite.  I hope that a month or two from now you'll be able to step back and
take another look and let us know what still needs work.

-Mark