On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Satish had gcov working before, but it just did not prove to be very > useful. First, we generally write tests > to look at the workflow for something rather than as a unit test. Second, > coverage ignores the path you > take to get to a certain line of code. My impression is that these things > are only useful when they tell you > lines which are never exercised. > The classical objective of coverage is to find which lines are never executed, so that you can either (a) eliminate the dead code or (b) write better tests. A less direct objective, which would use the information in a different way, is to detect redundant or mergeable tests. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that PETSc has a lot of tests that are not really distinct. (The same applies to tutorials. They get cleaned up occasionally, but there have been a lot of copies with only a few lines changed.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20130124/66e7ad42/attachment.html>
