Antiviruses not fond of inform (and another quick question)

Authoring Inform 7
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Hey! Decided I’d look into Inform and got some issues with installing it that raised my hackles a bit, so I figured it’d be worth asking around before I touched anything.

I can’t add screenshots, possibly because I’m a new account, but the affected files are git exe and glulxe exe in the interpreters folder. Namely, they were identified as “trojans (chgt dot ad)”.

Anyways forgive me for my paranoia, but I just wanted to be sure everything was okay with the download at the github ganelson inform 10.1.2 release before I start pulling things back out of quarantine.

I would like to assume this is a false positive! It usually is, and I’d prefer false positives to missing things. Still, I was wondering if this was common? And just how essential these files are overall. In an ideal world I could just leave them in there and go on my way, but I can hardly imagine that’s going to be the case.

For my second question, I figured I would ask about the IDE. How essential is that? Can the windows installer alone usually get you by?

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Windows Defender gave a false positive on my system. I think it happens a lot. I’ve reported both files safe to Microsoft more than once, for all the good it’s done.

I wouldn’t want to write a game without it, if that’s what you mean. Or was there something else you wanted to do? The IDE isn’t needed to play games.

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Right. I figured they probably were, I suppose, but it makes me feel a lot better to hear it’s not just me. So thanks!

And yeah, I definitely need the IDE, then. Do I need both, or just one or the other, if you don’t mind me asking? I don’t know the difference between the rpm and deb things and I can’t immediately find anything about that.

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I don’t know what those things are, but that’s probably just ignorance on my part. Is this something the installation is asking you?

I only ever use the most recent release. For Windows, that’s presently 10.1.2 here. Ah! I see there that there are two downloads of the IDE: one for Windows Installer and one with zipped files.

If that’s what you mean, yes, you only need one of them. I used the Windows Installer download.

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Right!!! Exactly.

I used the one on the ganelson github link used in the sticky on this forum, but I imagine it’s roughly the same thing. Now I just have to figure out if rpm or deb is what I want for windows…

Once again, thanks a ton for all of your help thus far sorting this out. I feel a lot better than I did when I made this post, I can say that much!

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…Does the windows install on the ganelson github come with the IDEs pre-installed? Because I’m being told those two formats are linux-style things.

(If so, that would be a rather nice little mercy, ehe.)

UPDATE: Yes!!! I think I should be good.

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Sounds like you’ve already solved your problem, but this is right - both are packaging formats for different flavours of Linux.

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I think you’ve already figured things out, but yes, we’ve had a lot of reports of this over the last few months, and yes, it’s a false positive. Exactly what the antivirus is finding is not clear. If you Google “chgt.ad” you get links indicating it’s some sort of heuristic detection, so it’s not that it’s found a specific trojan, it has instead found some sort of pattern that it thinks might be a trojan. What that pattern might be, no-one seems to know.

To answer the further points:

  • To use the IDE, you will really need those files - they drive the “Story” tab in the IDE, which shows the game you’re working on when you compile and run it.
  • The Windows installer installs the IDE and the compilers and everything you need to run Inform 7 on Windows. The release page also has Mac and Linux installers, but on Windows you don’t need those.
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