lcov tracefiles are used by various coverage reporting tools and build
systems (e.g., Bazel). It is a simple text-based format to parse and
more convenient to use than the JSON export format, which needs
additional processing to map regions/segments back to line numbers.
It's a little unfortunate that "text" format is now overloaded to refer
specifically to JSON for export, but I wanted to avoid making any
breaking changes to the UI of the llvm-cov tool at this time.
Patch by Tony Allevato (@allevato).
Just wondering whether we should add json format as well and document it instead of the text. Maybe eventually we'll be able to remove text at all to avoid any confusion? @vsk , what do you think?