So glad you got it to work! Glad to be assistive at least a little.
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And that is the difference between expert and novice. If you ever wondered why installing a new program, such as frotz, to play IF is such a deal breaker, you now know why.
APT, the GUI version, is an easy mouse click. Download a game? Another mouse click. Git? That’s just too painful to bear. You may not like it, but that’s just the way it is.
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You are so right!
I grew up with the command line and find it comfortable. When I started with Fortran in the late sixties, we didn’t even have command lines, just punch cards and batch processing. 
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Again, my makefile abstracts away all of the git and other things. That’s the advantage of it. It means you don’t need to do all those complicated steps yourself.
Again, that’s not button click easy. That’s confusing. That’s not good enough.
OTOH, I can copy and paste each steps sequentially no problem. I can put those steps in batch/shell script easy. If you’re trying to convince me that your complicated Makefile is easier to use than a simple no-brainer script, then you’re just wasting your time!
The makefile is a no-brainer script. Save it to a file called Makefile next to your foo.inf. Run make foo.z5. You can copy and paste it in! And now not only has inform been built, but so has your z5 (or z8 if you like).
Those five steps are not button-click easy either, is my point. And they rely on an even more complicated makefile anyway, so you aren’t going to get away from running make.
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I don’t get your point. Those six steps looks easy enough to me. Anyway, if you think that your makefile is good enough for everybody, feel free to put in a pull request to the git project. I have no interest whatsoever.
So it seems this is just about appearances? Because I pasted the Makefile in as a block of code to copy and paste instead of a link to a downloadable file? So if you saw the phone company had opened the box to the wiring cabinet, would you say “I don’t understand wiring, so now I can’t ever make any phone calls!”
And the whole point is that this Makefile is for your project. You put it next to your .inf files and it provides you with everything that’s required by those inf files.
I’m a bit confused about this makefile discussion… The makefile I wrote is not intended for the end user to paw through or edit. For pretty much every flavor of Linux, you just type make and then sudo make install. That’s it. If you’re on BSD, then you need to make sure GNU Make is installed and then you call gmake instead. If you’re doing a git clone, you need to do make submodules first though.
If you want a makefile to automate building your game, take a look at https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/uninvited and use the makefile there. That one is short, easy to understand, and easy to adapt. It also handles creating Blorb files. You just need to follow the structure I set up for the rest of the code.
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OK, so here’s an attempt to make this more like the other instructions:
- cd into the directory where your .inf files are (say,
foo.inffor this example). wget https://zork.net/inform6build/Makefile-
make foo.z3(also works forfoo.z8andfoo.z5)
The system will automatically download and build inform 6 for you with punyinform, and then build your zfile.
Yeah, sorry, this discussion isn’t really appropriate for this thread, and I’m sorry it’s gone on so long.
That is what you need to say, but please format it in clearer format. Interesting that I never typed “make” all by itself, and it still works. If you read the instructions, then it’s basically “cd this, cd that, git clone, make this, make that.” Except unlike your attempt for explanation above, the steps outlined are really presented in clear manner.
I don’t know why you’re having trouble understanding this point, but I’m not interested in explaining the difference about this extremely simple communication concept. So, just find a person who doesn’t use a computer and watch how it’s done without you saying or doing anything and see if the person can even install git properly.
Thank you for making it extremely simple so that I can understand it. However, I’d rather type “inform” and manually set the flags/options myself. I can do that much, at least.
Extraordinary…
I don’t know how I can make it more clear than I have it in the README.md file that shows up when you go to https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/inform6unix/. If anyone can suggest improvements, I’m very open to them.
The git repository is intended for use by people who already understand how to use git. Otherwise, a prospective Inform 6 programmer should get the tarball from the IF Archive at http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/source/ once I’ve finalized and uploaded it.
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Harry, IMVHO is best keeping /usr/bin|share|lib for distro installation, and all those self-compiled or not installed from the distro in the usr/local hierarchy… this ease system maintenance.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
(Linux user since 1995…)
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I can empathize with you. I think my message “I have no interest whatsoever” is extremely clear, and that he shouldn’t make any snide comment when I politely refused his offer. I end up questioning myself. Is it me? Or the other guy?
Personally, I find instructions at Adafruit to be very clear, even if I have to read them several times. I think the key is that they make no assumptions. I know you think that people who can clone git would know how to handle git, but IMO you shouldn’t make such assumption.
Ah, I have been doing exactly that. It’s just that this git issue, I’m used to doing it with apt-get, and I don’t know where to put git clone file/directory. I ended up putting it in my home directory, but I think it could have been somewhere else.
There’s also complications that I already have Inform installed, and I don’t know whether make will install it to the same places, or will there be conflict.
…which is why I also offer the package as something to be downloaded from the IF Archive.
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with subrelease 6, and looking at the relevant commits, isn’t now time to ease partial installation, adding an “installlib” to the makefile, considering the frequency of new releases of the major contrib library, and that in the meantime the core binary, inform-6.35 is unchanged ?
(install-puny depends on punyhowto and punytests, whose in turn depend to the main, inform-6.35 compilation…)
minor point, ./VERSION still says punyinform 3.0…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.