Having a .deb would be great and I hope you do it. But I’ll mention these alternatives:
install the current development gtk3 version of I7 via flatpak or build the current development gtk3 version of I7 from source (has known issues; see the thread)
And then these possibilities for working with Inform 7 without an IDE…
Integrations with editors (I don’t have personal experience with these):
- Vimform7 for vim
- Inform7 for VS Code
- Spaceformacs for the Spacemacs build of Emacs
Using the Cheesy Perl Interface from the Linux CLI package or using ni, inform6, and cBlorb manually on the CLI.
inf7: a CLI project manager for Inform 7 is my own project.