You are encouraged to consider submitting your development for addition to Coq's CI. This means that:
- Any time that a proposed change is breaking your development, Coq developers will send you patches to adapt it or, at the very least, will work with you to see how to adapt it.
On the condition that:
-
At the time of the submission, your development works with Coq's
masterbranch. -
Your development is publicly available in a git repository and we can easily send patches to you (e.g. through pull / merge requests).
-
You react in a timely manner to discuss / integrate those patches.
-
You do not push, to the branches that we test, commits that haven't been first tested to compile with the corresponding branch(es) of Coq.
For that, we recommend setting a CI system for you development, see supported CI images for Coq below.
-
You maintain a reasonable build time for your development, or you provide a "lite" target that we can use.
In case you forget to comply with these last three conditions, we would reach out to you and give you a 30-day grace period during which your development would be moved into our "allow failure" category. At the end of the grace period, in the absence of progress, the development would be removed from our CI.
A pitfall of the current CI setup is that when a breaking change is merged in Coq upstream, CI for your contrib will be broken until you merge the corresponding pull request with the fix for your contribution.
As of today, you have to worry about synchronizing with Coq upstream every once in a while; we hope we will improve this in the future by using coqbot; meanwhile, a workaround is to give merge permissions to someone from the Coq team as to help with these kind of merges.
Developments that link against Coq's OCaml API [most of them are known as "plugins"] do have some special requirements:
-
Coq's OCaml API is not stable. We hope to improve this in the future but as of today you should expect to have to merge a fair amount of "overlays", usually in the form of Pull Requests from Coq developers in order to keep your plugin compatible with Coq master.
In order to alleviate the load, you can delegate the merging of such compatibility pull requests to Coq developers themselves, by granting access to the plugin repository or by using
botssuch as Bors that allow for automatic management of Pull Requests. -
Plugins in the CI should compile with the OCaml flags that Coq uses. In particular, warnings that are considered fatal by the Coq developers must be also fatal for plugin CI code.
Add a new ci-mydev.sh script to dev/ci; set the corresponding
variables in ci-basic-overlay.sh; add the
corresponding target to Makefile.ci and a new job to
.gitlab-ci.yml so that this new target is run.
Have a look at #7656 for an
example. Do not hesitate to submit an incomplete pull request if you need
help to finish it.
You may also be interested in having your development tested in our performance benchmark. Currently this is done by providing an OPAM package in https://github.com/coq/opam-coq-archive and opening an issue at https://github.com/coq/coq-bench/issues.
It is sometimes the case that you will need to maintain a branch of your development for particular Coq versions. This is in fact very likely if your development includes a Coq ML plugin.
We thus recommend a branching convention that mirrors Coq's branching
policy. Then, you would have a master branch that follows Coq's
master, a v8.8 branch that works with Coq's v8.8 branch and so
on.
This convention will be supported by tools in the future to make some developer commands work more seamlessly.
The Coq developers and contributors provide official Docker and Nix images for testing against Coq master. Using these images is highly recommended:
- For Docker, see: https://github.com/coq-community/docker-coq
- For Nix, see the setup at https://github.com/coq-community/manifesto/wiki/Continuous-Integration-with-Nix