The old site at http://inform-fiction.org seems to be gone, and with it not just the DM4 but all the other useful articles. Does anyone know what’s going on?
I had noticed that too, a couple of weeks ago … so it doesn’t seem to be a temporary outage.
Fortunately, the materials you may need are still to be found on the IF Archive (ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc … form6.html).
For reasons buried in the sands of time, to find Inform materials on the Archive, you have to start in the Infocom directory rather than in the programming directory, but the DM4 and other materials are all there.
Another great resource, for anyone learning Inform 6, is Roger Firth’s site (firthworks.com/roger/informfaq/).
Thank you. That’s a relief, even though it makes me wonder if it means I6 as a standalone language is now left unsupported.
My main interest in I6 is partially in deepening my understanding of Inform 7, and partially in writing bare-bones games for platforms other than the PC. I doubt vanilla I7 is ideal for developing IF on the Amiga, for instance. 
No.
I’ve filed a bug report to bring this to the relevant person’s attention, whoever that may be.
(By the way, Jim, off topic from a post you made from another thread, but it does seem as though some I7 bugs are being resolved – looking at the bug tracker Graham marked three core Inform 7 bugs as resolved on December 19. I’ve pretty much given up on Kremlinology to figure out exactly what Graham is doing when.)
Point taken. I agree that it’s not possible for outsiders really to know what’s going on in I7 development. All we know for certain is that it has now been two years since the most recent release.
For comparison, I’m also fairly active in the Csound community. Like I7, Csound is a free software system used by a small but enthusiastic coterie of creative types. In the last two years there have been about five update releases of Csound, and the main developer (John ffitch) is very much a presence on the Csound mailing list. Also, Csound itself is open-source, and ffitch is not the only person contributing new code to extend its core functionality.
Granted, the Csound community is probably quite a bit larger than the Inform 7 community, but I also see a clear difference in design philosophy and the development culture.
Right, just pointing out that the bug tracking does seem to be happening.
I see Dec 19 but it’s of 2011. There seems to be very little overall activity, which is a bit concerning. The most recent stuff I see resolved is from DavidK.
It does seem like Inform 7 development is becoming even more of a black box. I hope that’s not a bad sign.
You may be right at that; I can’t find the ones I was looking at.
Not to kvetch, just a data point: If I go to the last page of Unassigned Issues on the Bug Tracker, I find that the earliest bug marked Serious was submitted on Nov. 6, 2010. It has not been switched to Assigned status. This may simply mean that the bug tracker interface is not being maintained, even though bugs are being fixed. Your guess is as good as mine, and maybe better.
The Inform 6 page was handed off by Graham a while back; I’m not quite sure of its maintenance status. The language itself is still being actively maintained by David Griffith in its own right, as well as being supported as a substrate of Inform 7.
Since the last build, Graham did a lot of work on Inform, resulting in a build state that is considerably different from the old one, and therefore needed more than the usual amount of hammering-on; and then he and I both had an extremely busy time for real life reasons, and were largely silent for a time. But the project is not abandoned, and to my knowledge the most recent time he worked on it was earlier today. Various new features are being documented, and I would imagine a bug fixing flurry will be the next stage before a probable release.
I am not offering a release date, for the usual reasons, but it’s not dead.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that Graham seems to assign bugs to himself after he changes their status to resolved, so I wouldn’t take that as an indication of anything. Also that he seems to resolve bugs in enormous clumps.