Re: TPF Devel::Cover grant report July 2013

On 9/1/13 10:53 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote:
> * Paul Johnson<[email protected]>  [2013-08-31T19:01:09]
>> 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!
>
>> 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