How can I run Gcov over an installed Cocoa application?

Question

I have a Cocoa application which uses an installer. I want to be able to run code coverage over the code (after it has been installed).

This is not the usual unit-test scenario where a single binary will run a suite of tests. Rather, the tests in question will interact with the UI and the app back-end whilst it is running, so I ideally want to be able to start the application knowing that Gcov is profiling it and then run tests against it.

Any ideas?

Update

Thanks to mustISignUp. To clarify why I asked the question:

The mistake I made was thinking that the object, .gcno and .gcda files had to be installed alongside the binaries (thus making the installer difficult). As it happens, the original location of the files is hard-wired into the code along with the instrumentation code.

The solution I went with is zipping up the code on the build machine and putting it on disk on the test machine. lcov (or just gcov) can be run from there. Alternatively, the .gcda files will be created on disk and they must be copied back up to the machine containing the source code.

Either way, the source code doesn't have to be present at install and run time, but if you want to get your results back lcov-style, the coverage counter files produced must be reconciled with the source code.

Answer 1

The app needs to be compiled with the correct GCC flags which will insert the profiling instructions into the code. It isn't something you can turn on and off. ie your code is modified at compile time to output the coverage info.

So, if you compiled the app with the correct flags it will emit coverage data, if you didn't, it won't (and you certainly wouldn't want it to for an app you were going to distribute).