The Coq mailing list

[Stefan Monnier <monnier AT iro.umontreal.ca>]

> <https://github.com/coq/platform>) - essentially a set of scripts and opam
> patches to install Coq and a set of frequently used libraries and plugins
> for all common OSes. The reason d'être of this project is to make it easy to
> regularly update Coq and Coq libraries. As main driver of this project
> I would be interested to understand what reasons people have to stay with
> 8.9.

There can be lots and lots of reasons why updating is undesirable or
"impossible" (e.g. the machines use a pre-built "disk image" which is
only updated by the admin staff in very limited ways (security bugs
only) between "major updates" which happen only every N years or so;
also those disk images are used by many people, some of whom would be
annoyed having to constantly adapt their code to new incompatible
versions).

Personally, I use the Coq that comes from Debian because that's the most
convenient way for me to install software (and know that it will be
kept up-to-date over the long run without any effort on my part).
Currently it's quite up-to-date, but that's not always the case, and
that's perfectly fine for my needs.

I think rather than make it easy to follow Coq's development
by-the-minute, it'd be more important to make it easy to write code
which works on all the Coq versions released in the last .. 10 years?


        Stefan