I'm using nose and coverage to generate coverage reports. I only have one package right now, ae, so I specify to only cover that:

nosetests -w tests/unit --with-xunit --with-coverage --cover-package=ae

And here are the results, which look good:

Name             Stmts   Exec  Cover   Missing
----------------------------------------------
ae                   1      1   100%   
ae.util            253    224    88%   39, 63-65, 284, 287, 362, 406
----------------------------------------------
TOTAL              263    234    88%   
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 68 tests in 5.292s

However when I run coverage xml, coverage pulls in more packages than necessary, including python email and logging packages which have nothing to do with my code.

If I run coverage xml ae, I get this error:

No source for code: '/home/wraith/dev/projects/trimurti/src/ae': 
[Errno 21] Is a directory: '/home/wraith/dev/projects/trimurti/src/ae'

Is there a way to generate the XML for just the ae package?

I had a similar problem and solved it with the --omit option. This made it run much faster and reduced the size of coverage.xml from 2MB to 70kB.

--omit=PRE1,PRE2,...  Omit files when their filename path starts with one ofthese prefixes.

I'm on Mac OS X, so I omitted the /Library/ and /Applications/ folders:

$ coverage xml --omit=/Library/,/Applications/

On other systems, you may find --omit=/usr/ more helpful.