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

Hello!

Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de> writes:

> On 2026-Jul-06, Jacob Champion wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2026 at 1:17 PM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de> wrote:
>> > I added -j0 to both so that they run parallel processes, which should be
>> > a few second faster.
>>
>> As a heads up, I found that adding parallelism on my local machine ran
>> it out of memory pretty quickly, with lcov 2.4. YMMV.
>
> Strange!
>
> Anyway I noticed that "-j0" doesn't work -- apparently it has to be "-j 0".
> I'll see how bad the memory usage gets on the next report, and turn that
> off (or set it lower?) if things are too tight.

I ran into the same issues and I took a different direction, since lcov
wasn't working I started to look for other solutions, turns out that
meson comes with a fallback if lcov is not installed called gcovr, and
works really well, at least for my requirements (not running in the full
stack), without any configuration I have a coverage report, enough at
least.

Has anyone tried gcovr before? I'd be interested to know whether there
are any drawbacks to using it.

Going back to lcov, according to an issue [0], it looks like users are
expected to use the "TOT" version, which makes no sense to me. I tested
the latest lcov release from last week, and I'm still experiencing the
same issues that started this thread.

In conclusion, I'll stick with gcovr for now rather than maintaining an
lcov configuration with many exceptions.

[0] https://github.com/linux-test-project/lcov/issues/473#issuecomment-4492099808

Regards

--
Jonathan Gonzalez V.
EDB
https://www.enterprisedb.com