A project for a collaborative, community-driven effort for the long-term maintenance and advertisement of Coq packages.

Note that this README (the manifesto) is a work in progress and is meant to be collaboratively improved. Please contribute!

Who runs this organization?

This organization is run by volunteer Coq users. Everyone is welcome (you don't need to be a very experienced Coq user to participate). Please get involved!

What are its goals?

Collaborative maintenance of Coq packages and tools

Projects can be hosted in coq-community whenever any of the following is the case:

• the initial author has stopped maintaining the project and someone else is volunteering to do so;
• the project has become a collective work (several community members are actively working on it);
• the initial author is still maintaining the project but they want to encourage other community members to participate in the maintenance and possibly take over (and the project is indeed raising interest from the community);
• the project is a tool of general interest and it makes sense to develop it collaboratively.

Each project under the umbrella of coq-community has one or several official maintainer(s), but the maintenance effort is done collaboratively. Users need not be afraid of volunteering to be the official maintainer of a coq-community project because they can step down at anytime. Changing the maintainer of a coq-community project can be done very easily without the hassle of moving its location too.

Maintenance is allowed to go much further than just updating the package to keep it compiling with newer Coq versions. It can also include refactorization of the code, uniformization of the style, merging with other packages, taking pieces out to put them in other libraries, and even removal of some parts that are not raising sufficient interest. These changes must, nonetheless, always be done with consideration for compatibility as soon as the package is a library, plugin or tool that has users.

Collaborative writing of documentation

Some Coq proofs present a particular pedagogical interest because their statements are easy to understand, but they require some non-trivial mathematical tools and their mechanization illustrates interesting proof patterns, or demonstrate the use of specific libraries. They can be used as the basis for tutorials which explain the tricks and interesting parts.

coq-community hosts several such documentation projects. Among them, Hydras & Co. collects libraries of formalized mathematics for inspiration and entertainment, including detailed documentation and exercises. Your contributions are welcome!

Advertising interesting packages

Not all the packages that are transferred to coq-community have the same initial quality. While this should not stop packages from being taken over, and new maintainers should strive to improve the package quality, some editorial work is also required to put forward the most interesting packages, be it for their usefulness as a library or plugin, because they demonstrate interesting proof techniques, or because they represent an important achievement.

Currently, the website highlights a selection of packages with ⭐ and warns about some others with ⚠️ to inform users that some packages are more recommended for reuse than others. Come chat with us if you want to participate in this editorial work.

FAQ

Contributing

• How can I contribute?

  We have a shared contributing guide, see CONTRIBUTING.md. Some specific projects may have additional contributing guidelines.

• How to propose a new package?

  This process is documented here.

• Can I propose a project of which I am the author?

  Yes, you can propose a project of which you are the author, as a way of preparing to pass on the maintenance to other community members. You can start up by proposing yourself as the primary maintainer for this project; but if you become less available for this task, we'll be able to pass on this role to someone else.

Position in the Coq ecosystem

• What is the relation to Coq's Continuous Integration (CI)?

  Coq's CI systematically tests a collection of external libraries and plugins for regression and compatiblity breakage with each proposed change to Coq before integration. When a library or plugin in Coq's CI breaks, Coq developers or contributors will send patches or give instructions how to adapt to the proposed change. A subset of coq-community packages are included in Coq's CI, and the process of fixing such packages that break is straightforward since Coq developers can themselves integrate the required changes.

• What is the relation to the Coq package index?

  The Coq package index is the present way of distributing Coq packages using opam. As such, all packages of coq-community are meant to be listed in the Coq package index.

• What is the relation to the Coq Platform?

  The Coq Platform is a continuously developed opam-based distribution of Coq together with a curated selection of generally useful packages. The Platform is currently the officially recommended way to install Coq. To ensure that packages are compatible with Coq over time, Platform package maintainers must agree to a form of social contract that, e.g., entails making timely releases as Coq evolves. While a subset of coq-community packages are also part of the Coq Platform and thus conform to Platform rules, coq-community packages are not necessarily generally useful or compatible with the Platform. To the Coq Platform, coq-community is one organization among many that host Platform packages.

• What is the relation to coq-contribs?

  Coq's contribs represent the legacy distribution, compatibility testing and maintenance model. There used to be a form allowing users to submit a package that the Coq development team would then maintain. While distribution now happens through the Coq package index and compatibility testing is done via Coq's CI, maintenance of legacy contribs is done less regularly.

  coq-community is a proposed replacement for the long-term maintenance of Coq packages. Whereas contribs were maintained by the Coq development team, coq-community is managed by the user community. We encourage users to “adopt” a package (including a legacy contrib) and to push the meaning of “maintenance” further than simply ensuring that the package continues to compile with newer Coq versions.

Best practices

• Do the projects of coq-community need to have some Continous Integration (CI) setup?

  Yes, CI plays a big role in keeping code projects more stable over time. In the case of a Coq package, it helps to ensure that the project stays compatible with the various versions of Coq that are claimed to be supported (as well as various versions of OCaml in the case of a Coq plugin).

  Templates for CI and other Coq-related configuration files are maintained in the templates repository.

• Which versions of Coq must be supported by projects of coq-community?

  At least the last stable version of Coq must be supported at any given time. Support for older versions or the development version of Coq can be decided project by project. Note that supporting the development version of Coq is a requirement to get into Coq's CI, which can be interesting to get patches from Coq developers when they introduce a breaking change (this is particularly recommended for plugins).

• What license to use for a coq-community project?

  The only strict requirement is to use a license that is either approved as an open source license by OSI or considered a free software license by FSF. However, if you create a new project or propose to transfer a project of which you are the sole copyright owner, we strongly encourage you to (re)license your project under one of the following two licenses:

  • MIT license: a very permissive and popular open source license. This is the best choice if you want to maximize the reusability of your project.
  • MPL-2.0 license: a weak copyleft license. You can use this license if you want to restrict the license under which modified versions of your project may be distributed. It does not limit how larger works may depend on your project. This license should be preferred over the (historically more prevalent) LGPL-2.1 license because it is technically simpler to understand and abide by.

  If neither of these two licenses can be used, we encourage using another license that is both approved as an open source license by OSI and considered a free software license by FSF.

Process / organizational aspects

• How to remove a package?

  When a package loses its interest because a newer, better alternative has been found, or for some other reason, the package can be marked as deprecated and stop being maintained. We will generally archive the repository rather than removing it completely though. It also happens that we archive a repository because its content has been merged in another one.

• What kind of permissions do the members have?

  Members of the coq-community organization have write-access to all the repositories. This permission should be used wisely: only minor fixes should be pushed without going through pull requests, and pull requests should preferably be approved by the project maintainer before getting merged. Some maintainers may decide to protect branches to enforce that all changes go through pull requests and validate some conditions. Maintainers are given admin-access on the repositories that they maintain. All members have the permission to create or transfer new repositories, but they should only do so after going through the standard process. At all times, there should be exactly three (active) owners of the organization. The current owners are Karl Palmskog (@palmskog), Pierre Roux (@proux01), and Théo Zimmermann (@Zimmi48).

• What to do in case of conflicts?

  We will have a governance process to make sure that we can handle conflicts that are bound to arise about the management of specific projects. Please contribute to meta-issue #2 which is about this.

History

• Why this name?

  The coq-community organization takes its inspiration from the similar-named elm-community. Here are some other sister organizations:

  • ocaml-community (officially inspired by elm-community and coq-community)
  • nix-community
  • reasonml-community

• Who made this awesome logo?

  This logo was designed by Aras from the openlogos project and was attributed to coq-community following a general mobilization of Coq users. Thanks to Aras and to the 94 people who voted for us to get this logo!

Is anything still unclear? Please open an issue or chat on Zulip to ask a question.