#19383 More detailed and/or more explicit explanations of the necessary actions in the coverage documentation Issue created by Tahir-itechart Describe the bug It's not critical I guess, but it would be great to have more details in the documentation. It started with the following problem: I have a .coverage.1 file from the first target and a .coverage.2 file from the second:

./pants --no-local-cache test --test-use-coverage --coverage-py-report="raw" --coverage-py-config="src/coverage.rc" ${target}
(for each target, I renamed the coverage files so that they would not be overwritten: .coverage -> .coverage.1, ...)
Name                                                             Stmts   Miss  Cover
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
target1                                                            28      0   100%

Name                                                Stmts   Miss  Cover
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
target2                                              109     24    78%

I want to combine these 2 files. As I understand it, I can't do this with the help of pants. When trying to do this with the help of pure coverage:

./pants run :coverage -- combine --rcfile=src/coverage.rc dist_pants/coverage/python
./pants run :coverage -- report --rcfile=src/coverage.rc
I get:
Name                                                             Stmts   Miss  Cover
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
target1                                                            28     28     0%
target2                                                           109    109     0%

If I try to get only a report, I get the same result:

./pants run :coverage -- report --rcfile=src/coverage.rc --data-file=dist_pants/coverage/python/.coverage.2

Name                                                Stmts   Miss  Cover
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
target2                                              109    109     0%

My config(coverage.rc) looks like this:

[report]
exclude_lines =
    pragma: no cover

skip_empty = True

[paths]
src =
    src/
    .pants.d/pyprep/sources/*/src
    /root/app/.pants.d/pyprep/sources/*/src

And what I described above was solved after reading the following piece of documentation written here:

You may use a Coverage config file, e.g. .coveragerc or pyproject.toml. Pants will autodiscover the config file for you, and you can also set [coverage-py].config in your pants.toml to point to a non-standard location. You must include relative_files = true in the [run] section for Pants to work.

And I just added

relative_files = true

to the config file. But from this description it is not clear to me exactly when to use the option: always when I use the config file or only when it is not in the standard location? And what kind of a non-standard location? Everything except root(project, pants)? In addition, it is not entirely clear how it works: after all, even without

relative_files

option the config file was read(for example, the init file was skipped) but at the same time, 'pure' coverage could not pull up the data created by 'pants' coverage and create a report Pants version Pants v2.14 Coverage v7.2.7 OS Linux, Ubuntu 22.04 pantsbuild/pants