I want to finish coverage.py 5.0. It has some big changes, so I need people to try it and tell me if it’s ready. Please install coverage.py 5.0 beta 1 and try it in your environment.

I especially want to hear from you if you tried the earlier alphas of 5.0. There have been some changes in the SQLite database that were needed to make measurement efficient enough for large test suites, but that hinder ad-hoc querying.

If you haven’t taken a look at coverage.py 5.0 yet, the big change is the addition of “contexts.” These can record not just that a line was executed, but something about why it was executed. Any number of contexts can be recorded for a line. They could be different operating systems, or versions of Python, or the name of the test that was running. I think it could enable some really interesting tooling.

If you are interested in recording test names as contexts, the pytest-cov pytest plugin now has a “--cov-context” option to do just that.

Contexts increase the data requirements, so data storage is now a SQLite file rather than a JSON file. The summary of what’s new in 5.0 is here: Major changes in 5.0.

Please try this. Soon 5.0 will be done, and people will begin installing it unknowingly. I would really like to minimize the turmoil when that happens.