Re: suggestion: minor change to maint.mk's 'coverage' targets to help develop coverage tests faster

[Jim Meyering]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Assaf Gordon <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to suggest the following minor change to the 'coverage' targets in 
> 'maint.mk'.
>
> With it, when improving coverage of the test suite, a developer can bootstrap 
> the coverage build with 'make coverage', then add individual test, then run 
> "make re-coverage" and just re-generate the reports, without the need to 
> rebuild and re-check the entire project.

That patch looks fine. As before, please capitalize the first word of
each sentence in the commit log.

I was going to say you should add the new target name as a dependent
of .PHONY, so that "make -t" does not create the corresponding file,
but then saw that was not done for any of the coverage-related
targets.

It should be done for all of those targets, but not necessarily on this diff.

> P.S.
> An alternative is to move the 'lcov' command into the 'gen-coverage' target, 
> but I wasn't sure if 'gen-coverage' is separate for some historical reason.

I don't know about the rationale.