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[Michael Soegtrop <MSoegtrop AT Michael-Soegtrop.de>]

Hi Pierre,

ah ok, so you have a system wide installation of Coq and are looking for 
a way to maintain it. This is definitely something we should and could 
support.

Enrico recently made a change in Coq to make it relocatable in a more 
controlled / reliable way. So one way would be to build Coq with opam in 
the usual way and then installing it to system folders using this 
relocation mechanism. We also create Windows installers from an opam 
switch which also uses this relocation mechanism. One could derive a 
Linux system install script from that.

It should also be possible to redirect the prefix of an opam switch to 
system folders, but this would likely mean that one has to disable opam 
sandboxing. Opam has a mechanism to ensure that make install of packages 
does not touch any files outside of .opam. It is not entirely free of 
danger to call make install for 100 open source packages with root 
rights. A rm -rf * in the wrong folder run as root is no fun.

Finally Enrico is working on a downloadable snap package for Linux. It 
should be sufficient to install the snap package just once.

Btw.: one feature of the Coq platform is that it is easy to customize 
for lecturers, so that they can provide a customized multi platform 
(Mac, Windows, Linux) setup for Coq. This way you can ensure that 
private installations of your students are identical to what you have 
and that the setup is easy to do and similar on all platforms.

We can discuss further details in the Zulip "Coq platform" topic of the 
Coq channel.

Best regards,

Michael