Progress continues in the Python coverage world. Two recent things: first, the latest alpha of Coverage.py 5.0 is available: 5.0a7. Second, pytest-cov is supporting coverage.py 5.0, and we’re talking about the future of pytest-cov.

There are two big changes in Coverage.py 5.0a7. First, there is a new reporting command: coverage json produces a JSON file with information similar to the XML report. In coverage.py 4.x, the data storage was a lightly cloaked JSON file. That file was not in a supported format, and in fact, it is gone in 5.0. This command produces a supported JSON format for people who want programmatic access to details of the coverage data. A huge thanks to Matt Bachmann for implementing it.

The second big change is to the SQL schema in the 5.x data file, which is a SQLite database. Previously, each line measured produced a row in the “line” table. But this proved too bulky for large projects. Now line numbers are stored in a compact binary form. There is just one row in the “line_bits” table for each file and context measured. This makes it more difficult to use the data with ad-hoc queries. Coverage provides functions for working with the line number bitmaps, but I’m interested in other ideas about how to make the data more usable.

The pytest-cov changes are to support coverage.py 5.0. Those changes are already on the master branch.

I’m also working on a pull request to add a --cov-contexts=test option so that pytest can announce when tests change, for accurate and detailed dynamic contexts.

Longer-term, I’d like to shrink the size of the pytest-cov plugin. Pytest should be about running tests, not reporting on coverage after the tests are run. Too much of the code, and too many of the bug reports, are due to it trying to take on more than it needs to. The command-line arguments are getting convoluted, for no good reason. I’ve written an issue to get feedback: Proposal: pytest-cov should do less. If you have opinions one way or the other, that would be a good place to talk about them.