CI for code coverage fails on new Ubuntu images

[ddeclerck]

Since the latest Ubuntu image, lcov fails complaining about negative branch counts.
It suggests passing fprofile-update=atomic to gcc, but that does not seem to help either.
So for now I've changed ubuntu-latest to ubuntu-22.04 in the coverage section of the CI definition, but it probably needs more investigation.

[GitMensch]

Please link a related CI build log.

[ddeclerck]

See this CI run.

[GitMensch]

If this is the only part that's failing I'd suggest to disable the coverage part for now, having CI running, then create a separate PR to update the CI definition (changed main one to also include MSYS1 etc) and after the "initial" part is in there pull it (so extended + improved CI in general, just without coverage) and in an additional draft PR try options for getting coverage to work.
[this may not have come up as Appveyor also uses Ubuntu 22.04, not 24.04 yet).

Is this an lcov2 and/or gcov13 issue?

[ddeclerck]

Note that this affects both 3.x and 4.x.

then create a separate PR to update the CI definition (changed main one to also include MSYS1 etc)

This is for 4.x right ? Was your PR #190 suitable for this update ?

Is this an lcov2 and/or gcov13 issue?

All I can say is that on the Ubuntu 22.04 image, we use gcov 11.4.0 + lcov 1.15, while on Ubuntu 24.04 we use gcov 13.3 + lcov 2.0

Apparently, lcov2 performs some data consistency check, so maybe the errors were already there but never reported...

We might workaround this by passing --ignore-errors negative to lcov...

That may be related to this GCC bug: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=68080, which resulted in the new gcc option -fprofile-update=atomic - though that did not help here...

[denishug]

Hello
i have created the #997 ticket last october about that .

Denis

[GitMensch]

We might workaround this by passing --ignore-errors negative to lcov...

make code-coverage-capture COVERAGE_LCOV_OPTIONS_DEFAULT=--ignore-errors negative (not sure if we additional need to pass gcov path) - if that fails with the previous lcov, then make that conditional on the environment

[GitMensch]

@denishug does it work to use these options?

[ddeclerck]

Here's my attempt at fixing this: PR #234