Another alpha of Coverage.py 5.0 is available: 5.0a4. This fixes a few problems with the new SQLite-based storage. Please give it a try, especially to experiment with dynamic contexts.

The challenge with this release was something that started as a seemingly simple fix. Coverage.py tries to emulate how Python runs programs, including how the first element of sys.path is set. A few people run coverage with sys.path fully configured, and coverage’s setting of sys.path[0] was breaking their stuff.

The proposal was simple: delete the one line of code that set sys.path[0]. I tried that, and it seemed to work. Fixed!

Not so fast: the Windows builds failed. This started a multi-week adventure of debugging and refactoring. The Windows builds were failing not because of Windows itself, but because on Windows, I don’t use pytest-xdist, which parallelizes tests into worker processes. With xdist, the tests were all passing. Without xdist, a few sys.path-related tests were failing.

It turns out that xdist manipulates sys.path itself, which was masking the fact that I had removed an important step from coverage.py. First thing to do was to adjust my test code so that even with xdist, my tests didn’t get xdist’s path changes.

Then I had to re-think how to adjust sys.path. That required refactoring how I ran the user’s Python code, so that I could apply the path changes a little earlier than I used to. That made me look at how I was testing that layer of code with mocks, and I changed it from explicit dependency injection to implicit mock patching.

A few more little fixes were needed here and there along the way. All told, the “one line” fix ended up being 14 files changed, 587 insertions, 427 deletions.