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13   Debugging

As much as it pains the developers of Covered to admit, there will be times when a user of Covered will encounter a problem in the resimulation process or will experience a performance issue during certain runs and will want to investigate the issue a bit themselves before posting a bug report. There may also be people out there who just might want to learn more about how Covered operates "under the hood". For those people whom I have just mentioned, this section is for you.

13.1   Verbose Debug Output

The brute force method of understanding Covered's internals is to generate verbose debug output using the global "-D" option to any of Covered's commands. The user of this method should take care to note that using this option may generate an extremely large amount of output and will definitely cause Covered's runtime performance to degrade considerably. If this option is used, its output should probably be redirected to a file for post-processing purposes. It should be noted that the verbose debug output is most useful for the developer's of Covered and is not meant to be of much help to the normal user.

13.1.1   Building Covered for Verbose Debug Outputting

Because generating verbose debug output can have a tremendous degradation in performance when it is even compiled, Covered requires the user to specify an option to the configuration/build process to enable this feature. To enable verbose debug outputting, simply specify the --enable-debug option to the configure script. This will cause Covered to compile in verbose debug output support and enable the use of the -D global option.

Note

If the user has not specified the --enable-debug option to the configuration script but proceeds to specify the -D global option, Covered will emit a warning message that it is unable to output verbose debug information due to the lack of the --enable-debug option being specified. It will then proceed to ignore the -D option.

13.1.2   Alternatives

If wasting valuable time sifting through thousands of lines of verbose (and somewhat terse) output is not your cup of tea, Covered also has two other means of extracting runtime information through the following facilities:

1. The Interactive Command-line Debugger
2. The Source Code Profiler

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