GCOV parser

The behavior of this parser was informed by the following sources:

Error handling

By default the parser raises an exception on unrecognized gcov output.

There are several known issues with the files generated by gcov which can be handled by --gcov-ignore-parse-errors which are descriped here. If no value is given to the option the value all is used the whole gcov file is ignored if the output is not recognized.

Negative hit counts

A bug in gcov can produce negative hit values (see gcov comment) which are not accepted by default. This behavior can be changed by using the value --gcov-ignore-parse-errors=negative_hits.warn or --gcov-ignore-parse-errors=negative_hits.warn_once_per_file. The first form warns on every line with a negative value the second one only once per processed file and adds a summary with the overall issues in the file.