A very short guide to a very small program.

• §1. What Inpolicy is
• §3. Policies

§1. What Inpolicy is. Inpolicy is a command-line tool whose sole purpose is to help keep the Inform 7 source code tidy. Unlike Inweb, Intest and Indoc, this tool can't sensibly be used for any project other than Inform.

If you have compiled the standard distribution of the command-line tools for Inform then the Inpolicy executable will be at inpolicy/Tangled/inpolicy. Usage is very simple:

    $ inpolicy/Tangled/inpolicy POLICY

where POLICY is whatever we want to check. There are very few at present; in some ways this program is a placeholder for future tightening-up of the style rules.

§2. When it runs, Inpolicy needs to know where it is installed in the file system. There is no completely foolproof, cross-platform way to know this (on some Unixes, a program cannot determine its own location), so Inpolicy decides by the following set of rules:

• (a) If the user, at the command line, specified -at P, for some path P, then we use that.
• (b) Otherwise, if the host operating system can indeed tell us where the executable is, we use that. This is currently implemented only on MacOS, Windows and Linux.
• (c) Otherwise, if the environment variable $INPOLICY_PATH exists and is non-empty, we use that.
• (d) And if all else fails, we assume that the location is inpolicy, with respect to the current working directory.

If you're not sure what Inpolicy has decided and suspect it may be wrong, running Inpolicy with the -verbose switch will cause it to print its belief about its location as it starts up.

§3. Policies. -check-problems makes a survey of (a) all of the Problem messages issued within the Inform 7 compiler, (b) all of the Problem test cases, and (c) all of the advisory references to Problems in the Inform documentation, and attempts to match these up. It prints out a report, and concludes with either "All is well" or a recommendation for changes. For example:

    1009 problem name(s) have been observed:
        Problems actually existing (the source code refers to them):
            906 problem(s) are named and in principle testable
            81 problem(s) are 'BelievedImpossible', that is, no known source text causes them
            14 problem(s) are 'Untestable', that is, not mechanically testable
            8 problem(s) are '...', that is, they need to be give a name and a test case
        Problems which should have test cases:
            904 problem(s) have test cases
            2 problem(s) have no test case yet:
                PM_SuperfluousOf
                PM_MisplacedFrom
        Problems which are cross-referenced in 'Writing with Inform':
            483 problem(s) are cross-referenced
    All is well.

As this example report shows, small sins are forgiven.

§4. -kit-versions reports the version numbers of the five kits built in to an Inform installation. The policy here is that these should always have version numbers exactly matching that of the core inform7 version number; so the option -sync-kit-versions is provided to enforce this, by changing the version numbers of the kits accordingly.