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Ongoing work: a few notes
This rudimentary blog-like page is to provide brief notes on changes to the Inform code base made between formal releases, and is only likely to be useful to people experimenting with unreleased builds of Inform.
Current status
The next formal release is v10.1.0. We are coming to the end of the beta period for that, and are concentrating on bug fixes, improvements to compatibility with old extensions, and making sure that concepts being introduced by 10.1 are set up in a way we can live with. Work also continues on the GUI apps, notably the MacOS app, which is being modernised to support Dark Mode.
News items
Withdrawal of -kit, but not of -basic (27 June 2022)
Up to this point, the beta of inbuild (and hence also of inform7) had a command-line switch "-kit". This told Inbuild that the named kit should be included in any build of a project to be specified later on the command line. For example,
$ inbuild -kit BasicInformKit -kit MyMagicKit -build -project MyProject.inform
The convention was that if no "-kit" was supplied, then the project would either include just BasicInformKit (if -basic was also given as an option) or else BasicInformKit and CommandParserKit. (These would then cause other kits to be included, such as WorldModelKit, and there would also be a kit to support the language of play, such as EnglishLanguageKit.)
This worked, but was clumsy. Users of the Inform apps could only take advantage by writing these command-line settings into both an "inform7-settings.txt" and "inbuild-settings.txt" file, and even then this was finicky (see Jira bug I7-2161). The command line is anyway not a good place to specify metadata which properly belongs to a project, and also had no way to express version numbers for the kits desired.
"-kit" has now been abolished. "-basic" remains, and works as before.
So how do you specify that a project expects to see a kit? The answer is to place a suitable project_metadata.json file into the project's materials directory. See A Guide to Project Metadata.
Incremental building of kits enabled (26 June 2022)
This is arguably a bug fix, but is not directly a fix of any currently open bug in Jira (but see closed I7-2155). It was always intended that inbuild and inform7 would incrementally build any kits they need in order to build Inform projects: that has worked up to now with the standard kits, but in many circumstances not with newly written kits, such as those intended to be used with language extensions. (It's complicated: some ways of using inbuild did in fact do this, but inform7 did not.)
This is now enabled. On the console (or in the app's Console pane), you will now see lines like the following when a kit is being rebuilt by inform7 itself:
(Building FrenchLanguageKit for architecture 16)
(Building FrenchLanguageKit for architecture 16d)
(Building FrenchLanguageKit for architecture 32)
(Building FrenchLanguageKit for architecture 32d)
A side-effect of all this is that the output of inbuild -graph for a project is now substantially longer. This is basically because a project does indeed depend on lots of source files, and the new larger graph is a truer picture than the old ones. But we may eventually work out more concise ways to print it.
Language metadata respecified as JSON (23 June 2022)
As has been noticed already (see e.g. Jira bug I7-2155), the new Inbuild has been fairly sketchy in its handling of language bundles, and of using Inform to make non-English IF. In particular, language kits such as FrenchLanguageKit (if provided) were not being loaded automatically and instead required -kit to be used at the command line, or with a settings file; and even then, EnglishLanguageKit was being loaded as well, causing definition clashes.
This should all now be resolved.
Language bundles have now been redesigned, and are documented in the Inbuild manual, which has been rewritten today: see A Guide to Language Bundles. Like kits, language bundles are adopting the new JSON metadata format.
Change of testing UUID (22 June 2022)
A change to the batch-testing tool Intest means that the UUID used for Inform projects being tested is now 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000: this is meant to be a visibly bogus value, replacing 0B00B00D-3307-4688-B2D8-95DB962781B4. UUIDs are in theory unique per project, but Intest operates Inform projects with this single bogus UUID for every test case it runs.
As a result, all six inblorb test cases and 9 of the inform7 tests will fail (1=Awkward 2=Audiovisual 3=Fancy-Z 4=Plain-Z 5=Plain 6=Ingredients 7=Fancy 8=Index-Card 9=Index-Card2) by showing a discrepancy on the UUID somewhere unless you have pulled the latest Intest.
Kit metadata respecified as JSON (4 June 2022)
Kits are new in 10.1, and are documented in the Inbuild manual, which has been rewritten today: see A Guide to Kits.
The change today is that the "kit_metadata.txt" file has now changed format and name, to become "kit_metadata.json". This JSON format is a work in progress and is likely to become a uniform way to describe resources used by Inbuild (extensions, language bundles, interpreters, website templates, and so on): the point of having such a format is to prepare the way for Inbuild to understand remote resources somewhere on the Internet. For now JSON metadata files exist only for kits, but some of the plumbing has been put in for general resources to have them.
This required new APIs in the foundation library at the Inweb repository to read, write and validate JSON files: see the new section JSON. You'll therefore need to pull the latest Inweb in order to build the latest Inform.
The current set of requirements for what Inbuild will read as resource metadata is at inform7/Internal/Miscellany/metadata.jsonr. There are also a few semantic constraints: see JSON Metadata.
Versioning policy for the built-in kits (4 June 2022)
There are currently five kits supplied in the Inform installation:
WorldModelKit
EnglishLanguageKit
CommandParserKit
BasicInformKit
BasicInformExtrasKit
Up to now these had no version numbers, but we want to encourage all kits to have semantic version numbers, so we should comply with that ourselves.
In practice these kits are tightly coupled to the main compiler: (a) many bug fixes in Inform which users think of as compiler fixes are in fact changes to these kits; and (b) in normal circumstances people will never want to use the kits from one build with the compiler from another. So the most useful way to describe the version of a built-in kit is to identify which compiler release it came with.
As a policy decision, the version numbers of these five kits are therefore going to be the same as those of the main compiler. (Today, that's "10.1.0-beta+6V21".)
This is enforced by changes to the makescript used when updating the main compiler's version number, which uses a new feature of the Inpolicy tool:
inpolicy/Tangled/inpolicy -sync-kit-versions
For its implementation, see: Kit Versioning.
User-written kits not included in the Inform installation should not do this. They won't be tied to particular compiler releases, and should have their own semantic version numbers reflecting their own history of development.
Incorporation of "6M62 Patches" (31 May 2022)
In recent years Inform users have been keeping an extension called "6M62 Patches", which contained a small selection of bug fixes to the template files of Inform 6 code in build 6M62 (i.e., Inform version 9.3). Those template files have now become kits, the Inform 6 code has become Inter code, and changes to the way the "Include..." sentence works mean that "6M62 Patches" is not compatible with v10.1.
It would be easy enough to fix that, but there is now no need: all bug fixes in "6M62 Patches" have been adopted in the kits for v10.1. Any old project which included "6M62 Patches" can now stop doing so.
It was a real public service to create and maintain "6M62 Patches", and we thank everyone who contributed to it: their work lives on.