Version: 7.2.1-beta+1B67 'Escape to Danger' (24 July 2024)
Inweb offers a modern approach to literate programming (LP). Unlike the original LP tools of the late 1970s, led by Donald Knuth, or of the 1990s revival, Inweb aims to serve programmers in the Github age. It scales to much larger programs than CWEB, and since 2004 has been the tool used by the Inform programming language project, where it manages a 300,000-line code base.
Literate programming is a methodology created by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s. A literate program, or "web", is written as a narrative intended to be readable by humans as well as by other programs. Inweb is itself written as a web, and its human-readable form is a companion website to this one.
For the Inweb manual, see ★ inweb/Preliminaries.
Except as noted, copyright in material in this repository (the "Package") is held by Graham Nelson (the "Author"), who retains copyright so that there is a single point of reference. As from the first date of this repository becoming public, 28 April 2022, the Package is placed under the Artistic License 2.0. This is a highly permissive licence, used by Perl among other notable projects, recognised by the Open Source Initiative as open and by the Free Software Foundation as free in both senses.
A condition of any pull-request being made (i.e., to make suggested amendments to this software) is that, if the request is accepted, copyright on any contribution made by it immediately transfers to the project's copyright-holder, Graham Nelson. This is in order that there can be clear ownership.
Caution: The main branch of this repository generally holds "unstable", that is,
unreleased work-in-progress versions of Inweb. See notes/versioning.md.
Inweb is intentionally self-sufficient, with no dependencies on any other software beyond a modern C compiler. However, it does in a sense depend on itself: because Inweb is itself a web, you need Inweb to compile Inweb. Getting around that circularity means that the initial setup takes a few steps.
Make a directory in which to work: let's call this work. Then:
- Change the current directory to this:
cd work - Clone Inweb:
git clone https://github.com/ganelson/inweb.git - Run one of the following commands.
bash inweb/scripts/first.sh linuxbash inweb/scripts/first.sh macosbash inweb/scripts/first.sh macos32bash inweb/scripts/first.sh macosarmbash inweb/scripts/first.sh macosunivbash inweb/scripts/first.sh unixbash inweb/scripts/first.sh windows
- Test that all is well:
inweb/Tangled/inweb -help
Some notes on which platform to choose:
- For Intel Macs running MacOS 10.13 ("High Sierra") or earlier, use macos32. This will produce 32-bit x86 executables; we are no longer really supporting this.
- For Intel Macs running MacOS 10.14 ("Mojave"), use macos. This will produce 64-bit x86 executables.
- For Apple Silicon Macs, use macosarm. This will produce 64-bit ARM executables.
- To produce universal binaries (64-bit x86 and ARM combined) on Apple Silicon Macs, use macosuniv, but expect your compilation times to double, of course.
- For a generic version of Unix where the Linux settings do not work, try using unix. (For Solaris, for example.)
- For Windows, the mingw-w64 environment provided by the MSYS2 project is required.
Download and install MSYS2. Start the MSYS2 MINGW64
environment, then in the resulting shell window run the following to install
everything needed:
pacman -Suypacman -S gitpacman -S makepacman -S zippacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-clang
- Android support has existed in the past, but the Android Inform community has not yet an opportunity to contribute build settings.
You should now have a working copy of Inweb, with its own makefile tailored
to your platform now in place (at inweb/inweb.mk). To build inweb again, e.g.
after editing inweb's source code, do not run the shell script first.sh again.
Instead, you must use: make -f inweb/inweb.mk
If you wish to tweak the makefile, do not edit it directly. Instead,
edit inweb/scripts/inweb.mkscript and inweb/Materials/platforms/PLATFORM.mkscript,
where PLATFORM is your choice as above (e.g., 'macos'). Then run make -f inweb/inweb.mk makers
to rebuild all these makefiles with your changes incorporated; and then run
the shell script inweb/scripts/first.sh again.
A few features of inweb used when integrating the core Inform software into its apps rely on having the standard Unix tool "rsync" installed: so on Linux, where not all installations provide rsync by default, you may want to install this if you are intending to do development work with the Inform apps. But since rsync is not needed for the core literate-programming functions of inweb, most users will have no need.
The bug tracker for Inweb is powered by Jira and hosted at the Atlassian website. (Note that Inform, Inweb and Intest are three different projects in Jira: please do not report Inweb issues on the Inform bug tracker or vice versa.)
The curator of the bug tracker is Brian Rushton, and the administrator is Hugo Labrande.
Substantially different versions of Inweb have been open-source before, but this version is essentially a fresh reimplementation with a different design. It is the curse of literate-programming tools that they serve only their own authors, that is, few LP tools please users other than the creators: thus, only Knuth really uses CWEB, for example. But perhaps that will change. It's time for LP to be tried again, and Inweb may be a start.
For the moment, however, Inweb's future direction remains in the hands of the original author. It needs to be reliable and to keep the Inform and Intest projects working, as well as itself.
At some point a more formal process may emerge, but for now community discussion of possible features is best kept to the IF forum. In particular, please do not use the bug trackers to propose new features.
Pull requests adding functionality or making any significant changes are therefore not likely to be accepted from non-members of the wider Inform team without prior agreement, unless they are clear-cut bug fixes or corrections of typos, broken links, or similar. See also the note about copyright above.
The Inweb licence is highly permissive, and forks which develop in quite different ways are entirely within the rules. (But one of the few requirements of the Artistic Licence is that such forks be given a name which is not simply "Inweb", to avoid confusion.)
Inweb contains a substantial library of code shared by a number of other programs, such as the Intest testing tool and the Inform compiler and related tools.
This library is called "Foundation", and has its own web here: ★ foundation-module.
A small executable for running unit tests against Foundation is also included: ★ foundation-test.
If you have also built Intest as work/intest, then you can try these:
- intest/Tangled/intest inweb all
- intest/Tangled/intest inweb/foundation-test all
This README.mk file was generated automatically by Inweb, and should not be edited. To make changes, edit inweb.rmscript and re-generate.