Getting new coverage output format from go test -cover

[Paul Chesnais (papacharlie)]

Hello,

I'd like to be able to merge the data from the output of `go test -cover` with the output of a run using `go build -cover` but it seems that there's no way to translate the "legacy" format from go test into the new binary format. This means it's not possible to use the built-in tooling like `go tool covdata merge`. There is of course the possibility of translating the binary format back into the legacy format using textfmt but then there's still no good way to merge the coverage data without using some custom tooling like https://github.com/wadey/gocovmerge.

As far as I can tell there's also no way to get clever and get `go test -c` to build with the binary with the `-cover` flag because that build flag gets eaten up by `go test`. It seems there's no way to get the new coverage format from go test, unless I'm missing something?

Just looking for any insights on this, thanks in advance!

Paul