rcov bugs

There is a really irritating bug in the ruby bindings for Rcov that has been reported by Brian Candler here among other places. Applying Brian's patches solves part of the problem (I think they are now in trunk) but the problem that throws up the error

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/formatters/pretty.rb:131:in `[]': no
implicit conversion from nil to integer (TypeError) 

mentioned later in the post is more annoying - not least because it came back after I already got rid of it once! I have a hunch that this error can be triggered by the content of the html being generated by rcov, and in my case it was triggered by a test requiring a missing file. At first I didn't realise this was the problem of course, and the trace didn't give me a clue about which test caused the problem. The proximate cause lies in a method called wrap in /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/formatters/pretty.rb.

After messing around for a bit i found I that changing the wrap method to return just a string worked fine

def wrap(string, width)
        # Recursively wrap string at width.
        return string 
        
      end

This gave me an error that identified that culprit test. I could then fix the path to the missing file, change pretty.rb back to the original version, and carry on ...