As far as I can tell, the plugin's functionality to locate coverage results is functioning as intended. I've
committed a patch to improve the help for this, which should be included in plugin version 0.8.7. I'm
going to mark this issue as FIXED. If anyone has reason to think that there's more to this issue, feel free to
re-open it.

Included in cobertura plugin version 0.8.7, which is now released.

I've just upgraded my covertura plugin to 0.8.7 and tried a basic test with it
but without any luck. (Hudson is also up-to-date)

In the log I get:
No coverage results were found using the pattern '../cobertura/coverage.xml'
relative to '/home/wwwHome/jobs/test/workspace/test'. Did you enter a pattern
relative to the correct directory? Did you generate the XML report(s) for
Cobertura?

If I open a shell to the box and move to the folder mentioned above, I can open
the file without any problem:
[timboven@freebsd /home/wwwHome/jobs/test/workspace/test]$ vi
../cobertura/coverage.xml
gives me the xml.

The project in question is checked out from cvs but I've also checked out an
extra module.

The plugin is currently working as-intended when it doesn't recognize Cobertura report XML files that are
outside of the "module root" (for Subversion/CVS/ClearCase snapshots, this is a level beneath the
workspace directory). If you are generating your Cobertura report XML files somewhere outside of the
module root, you can't use ".." within the report pattern to navigate outside of the module root. Since this
behavior is working as intended, no further changes will be implemented under this ticket.

If you would like the ability to have your coverage XML files somewhere other than the module root,
please vote for enhancement 3862, which proposes adding an additional configuration field to specify
this.

No further work intended towards this ticket. If you want the ability to configure what directory your
"Cobertura xml report pattern" is relative to, please vote for issue 3862.