• JaCoCo version: JaCoCo 0.8.5.201910111838
• Operating system: Gentoo x86 linux-5.4.72-gentoo
• Tool integration: Maven / Gradle
• Description of your use case:

I am using Jacoco in a CI/CD envionrment with GitLab. GitLab is an alternative Git-based platform for project-management that has integrated CI/CD functionality. It allows parsing Cobertura based coverage reports and integrating them directly in the Diff view for a merge request. The functionality is described here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/test_coverage_visualization.html#maven-example

The recommendation is to use the well supported and modern coverage tool Jacoco. But the common parsing format for coverage is based on Cobertura. To bridge that gap, they recommend using two little converter scripts that convert the coverage report to Cobertura compatible format, based on these scripts: https://gitlab.com/haynes/jacoco2cobertura

Eventho this is a viable approach, I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a feature to output Cobertura format directly from JaCoCo.

A random example for the format I found online:
https://gist.github.com/apetro/fcfffb8c4cdab2c1061d

Possible Workarounds

If such functionality is out of the scope of this project, I do not think there is any viable workaround. Instead, users should use scripts like https://gitlab.com/haynes/jacoco2cobertura or GitLab should integrate parsing the JaCoCo XML format.