I think this is a serious issue, and really needs to be addressed. Inform7 has had many “bugfix” releases, and I’ve been recommended to use the latest version as a result, but there seems to be a polite fiction existing around the many extensions directly linked on the Inform7 webpage: many of them are just plain broken.
So it seems like syntax is incredibly fluid in Inform, and phrasings that worked in a build may not work just a few builds later. This is hell for a developer to try and figure out through trial and error 6L02 is compatible with Extension Blah by John Smith but not Extension Foo by Jane Jones. I believe the versioning philosophy is a contributor to this problem.
For instance, in Python (and many other pieces of software) a major version number is intended to signal incompatibility due to changed data structures or protocols or configuration files. Minor versions are fixes and small feature additions, and typically backwards compatibility is preserved. Admittedly, this is not the only way to structure software versioning, but it is probably the most common in use today.
I am relatively new to Inform, so anyone correct me if I’m speaking out of turn here, but Inform’s versioning is pretty hard to follow. I am using “Inform 7,” though 7 is not really the major version, but an entirely new language compared to Inform 6. Whether or not a given piece of Inform7 code will compile with the version you have is a crapshoot. Going to “about” reveals that the version I have is “Version 1.54 (1.54.4)”. I still do not know what this means, and have not heard of this number referred to anywhere. The build number I have is 6L38. It starts with 6 rather than 7, which is a little counterintuitive. I’ve observed numerous breakages in many of the extensions I’ve used between this version and 6L02 and whatever version I was using before that. Some of the extensions I’ve fixed, others were beyond my meager skill to fix. Am I totally off the mark here, or is it tough to find an indicator of what will work where? This seems like a big source of frustration for new Inform authors.
Edit: I realize there is a topic here devoted to which extensions are working and which are broken, as well as a repository at The Public Library for working extensions. Most of my points still stand in that I couldn’t find that forum topic googling for the error messages I encountered, and referring someone to github or a third party website for a working extension is not a great solution.