Hi Philip,
I am happy to share the work. The source tree is a bit messy at the moment so I will need to tidy up a little. I am pulling together an Ubuntu 16.04 deb now and will also be attempting Fedora 30/31 rpms.
Here is a short explanation of what was done to get the program up and running:
Packaging Changes: To overcome the webkit-1.0 dependency affecting Fedora 29, I recompiled webkit-1.0 on Fedora 29 and added the specific libraries gnome-inform depended on to the gnome-inform rpm itself. So the rpm is carrying around libwebkitgtk-1.0.so and libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0.so now. To overcome the libgoocanvas dependency affecting Ubuntu 18.04, I migrated libgoocanvas into the source tree and linked statically to libgoocanvas. Essentially the same way chimara was handled in the source tree.
Build File Changes: The bulk of the dependency work around effort affected the top level Configure.ac, gnome-inform7.spec, debian control/rule files, and the Makefile.am in the src directory.
Source Changes: Generally, there are no changes to the base gnome-inform7 6L38 code except for a minor workaround I put in for what appears to be a GTKFileFilter bug (3 lines).