Re: Coverage (lcov) failing with inconsistent error in versions 2.x

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: "Jonathan Gonzalez V." <jonathan.abdiel@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2026-07-01T15:55:48Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> (As an aside: I want to be careful in how I speak about lcov 2.x. I'm
> not an expert in that system, and it's entirely possible that all of
> the errors causing it to bail out by default are in fact legitimate
> problems in the underlying coverage data that is emitted by a
> compiler, rather than bugs in lcov. But I do believe that the current
> state of lcov makes it pretty much unfit for purpose with today's
> widely-used toolchains and codebases. I'm pretty disappointed in how
> v2 is behaving.)

Yeah.  It seems like lcov 2.0 is kind of okay (it's working for me
anyway), but the later versions are more broken.  I'm not excited
about changing our docs to reflect that, and definitely -1 on
changing our code.  I think we just have to wait and hope they
get things sorted.

> We could rewrite https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CodeCoverage, maybe.

+1, that page seems to be mostly ancient history at present.

			regards, tom lane