The clover should fork the junit tests

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I don;t the link bewteen forking unit tests and Clover. The unit tests are run by the "test" plugin and there's already a property that you can use to fork the unit tests.

When I ran clover I had to fork the jvm running the tests unless only the first testXX in each TestCase was run giving a very low cover report.

Ah yes, I think I understand. That's because clover flushes its coverage buffer on JVM exit. Thus if you generate the report right after running the tests, you will miss some test coverage. Forking the tests let them run in another JVM and thus the clover data is flushed before the report is generated.

See http://www.thecortex.net/clover/FAQ.html

We could force the unit tests to be run in a separate JVM or use an interval flush policy.

Sounds like the reason

What about changing the default behavior to forking the jvm for now untill someone can figure out a way to flush the files?

If you want a patch let me know.

I tried to get the interval flush policy to work, but didn't have much success.

I agree that until we can make it work correctly (not require a fork for clover to work), then we should make it work better out of the box.

I suggest a default of

maven.clover.fork=true

Which will override maven.junit.fork variable if set to true.

Hence the forkage would look like this -
(CF = Clover Fork, JF = JUnit Fork)
CF=0,JF=0 => DON'T FORK
CF=0,JF=1 => FORK
CF=1,JF=0 => FORK
CF=1,JF=1 => FORK

I think it was already fixed (fork was always on). However as I have alwso fixed clover:on it should also work if you use clover:on standalone (i.e. without calling clover:test).