gEDA: New development release of Covered (covered-20040211) now available

[Trevor Williams <trevorw@charter.net>]

A new development release of Covered for Verilog code coverage analysis 
is now available at its website:

http://covered.sourceforge.net

It has been a long time since the last release (November 15th of last 
year), but a lot of work has gone into making this release's reporting 
capabilities much more readable, understandable, succinct and correct. 
I have added the changelog information for this new release below. 
Have fun!

Trevor Williams


Release notes for covered-20040211
---------------------------------------------

Release covered-20040210 made.  A lot of work has gone into this release 
to make the report output more readable and concise.  Several bug fixes 
have been made as well.  A GUI is on the way for report viewing that 
will be available in alpha version in the next development release.  
Below are some of the highlights of this release.

 - Added GUI interfacing functions in preparation of upcoming GUI 
report viewing utility.

 - Added more information about expressions to line and combinational 
logic coverage verbose information.  Rather than just outputting the RHS 
of the expression, the LHS and assignment operator (blocking or 
non-blocking) or IF statement are output to give the user a better 
context of the missed logic.

 - Fixed bug in param.c where parameters found in the RHS of 
expressions that were part of statements being removed were not being 
properly removed.

 - Fixed bug in sim.c where expressions in tree above conditional 
operator were not being evaluated if conditional expression was not at 
the top of tree.

 - Changed output of logic in combinational logic verbose coverage 
reporting to (by default) use the same format (in terms of endline 
characters) as the logic was found in the source code.

 - Added '-w [<line_width>]' option to report command that causes 
combinational logic to be output to report as much logic as will fit in 
the value of <line_width> in the report.  A default value of line width 
is specified internally in Covered to be 105 characters; however, the 
user may make this value larger or smaller to suit.  This value reverses 
the effect of the above bulletin.  Added this option to Covered's 
regression suite to test.

 - Completely modified output format of missing combinational logic 
coverage.  Removed a lot of coverage information that was extraneous.  
When three or more subexpressions are ANDed, ORed, logical ANDed, or 
logical ORed, coverage information is output in a special way to 
increase readability/understandability for this coverage.

 - Added "GENERAL INFORMATION" section to all reports which specifies 
general information about this report (this eliminates a lot of 
redundant information in the report to improve readability).

 - Added the name of the CDD file from which a report has been 
generated from in the GENERAL INFORMATION section of the report.

 - When a CDD file is created due to merging CDD files, the names of 
the original CDD files are now stored in the merged CDD file.  This 
information is output in the GENERAL INFORMATION section of the report 
(created from this merged CDD file) to indicate to the user this 
information.

 - If a CDD file is created due to merging CDD files and the leading 
hierarchies in each of those CDD files are different, a bullet in the 
GENERAL INFORMATION specifies this and reminds the user that the leading 
hierarchy information will not be output in the rest of the report 
(instead the string "<NA>" replaces the leading hierarchy information).  
This will help to eliminate confusion when viewing the reports and fixes 
an outstanding bug in Covered.

 - Added starting and ending line information to module structure for 
GUI purposes.

 - Removed scope information in CDD file for expressions, signals and 
statements.  This information was not used, caused CDD files to become 
excessive in size and mildly speeds up reading in CDD files.

 - Fixed bugs in combinational logic report section where summary 
coverage numbers and verbose coverage numbers did not agree.

 - Removed 'c' directory in 'diags' directory and cleaned up Makefile 
to run regressions.

 - Masked off the value of the SET bit in expressions output to CDD 
files.  This information is not needed and sometimes caused regression 
failures due to CDD file mismatches on different platforms or using 
different simulators.

 - Modified regression Makefile to specify the 'vvp' command prior to 
the compiled VVP executable when running Icarus Verilog regressions (due 
to recent change to IV).

 - Changed instance-based reports to not merge child instance coverage 
information into parent instance coverage information.  This is not done 
in module-based reports, makes reading this information confusing and 
doesn't provide us any extra information.

 - Fixed bug where modules were being reported in verbose reports when 
coverage numbers were 100% covered.

 - Changed toggle coverage report output to output toggle information 
in hexidecimal format versus binary format.  This keeps the toggle 
coverage information more succinct/readable. Added underlines between 
every 4th hexidecimal value to help user's to discern the bit position 
of a toggle bit.

 - Changed the format of the report entirely to enhance readability 
(many changes here that the user will immediately see).

 - Updated user documentation for new changes and added new section 
called "Reading the Report" which will walk the user through several 
reports and how to interpret the report information.  This section is 
still in progress at this time.

 - Updates to development documentation.

 - Lots of new diagnostics added to regression suite.  We now have over 
200 diagnostics in this regression.

Special note:  Please note that the CDD file format for this release has 
changed from previous CDD files and is therefore incompatible with older 
versions.  If you try to read a CDD file generated from an older version 
of Covered with the newer version, Covered will tell you that this 
cannot be done due to incompatible CDD versions.