Currently, the clover span attribute is used to specify the age of coverage recordings that get loaded when:

• generating a report
• saving a history point
• saving a checkpoint
• merging databases
• performing a clover-check

The default is to only load coverage data that were generated since the last instrumentation event.

I propose changing this default behaviour to include all coverage data available. The span attribute can then be used to limit the age of the coverage data used.