Just FYI for anyone trying to get gnome-inform7 working on modern releases: I was able to get interactivefiction’s version above working on a fresh install of Linux Mint 20 Ulyana today by first manually adding the following packages:
libicu60 *
libgtksourceview2.0
libgtksourceview2.0-common
libgtkspell0
libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0
libwebkitgtk-1.0
The packages were obtained from https://packages.ubuntu.com and all versions were taken from the bionic release, using amd64 versions. The last five of the packages are directly required by gnome-inform7-6M62-ubuntu-1604-1804.x86_64.deb. The first one (libicu60, marked with an asterisk) is required by one of the other packages (libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0, I think), so it should be installed first. After that, the first five, and after those, the actual application.
Installation is easy enough using gdebi-gtk (GUI) or gdebi (command line) for each .deb file. Since Linux Mint 20 is based on Ubuntu 20.04, a long-term support release (and therefore the same process should work for both), this should be possible until at least 2025, assuming you can still get the bionic packages after 2023.
Thanks to @interactivefiction for your work on updating the package for the previous LTS release! It’s very much appreciated, especially the bug fix for the grayed-out folders problem. I haven’t tried out vimform7 yet, but it looks promising.
[FYI - Even though you’re not working on this any more, there is one other minor bug that you might look into: When creating a new project for an extension, the application creates a folder for the extension called Name.i7x and a file containing the actual extension called Name.inform, both on the same directory level. In other words ,the suffixes for file and folder are reversed, and the file is not placed inside the folder.
I did report this as a bug in Mantis, but that’s down now, it seems. I would think given what you’ve already done that this would take a pretty short time to fix, perhaps just swapping the relevant suffix strings to fix the names and adjusting a path to fix the file’s saved location. Is the source code for your version posted somewhere? If so, I would be happy to look for the specific lines myself, to assist.]