Inform 7 Extension Submission Guidelines

There have been some questions recently about how extensions appear on the Public Library vs. the inform7.com website. I wanted to take a stab at describing the rules from an extension developer’s point of view. I invite others to comment on this because I am not dictating the rules, just describing them.

Extension submissions that are compatible with the latest version of inform7 (6L38 as of this writing) are eligible for the Public Library if they meet all the following criteria:

1. They can be included in a game’s source without reporting any warnings or errors
2. All the examples in the documentation work “out of the box”
3. They use the “responses” system to reply to player’s commands, and those responses use adaptive text.
4. They do not include anything that would prevent Inform from being hosted on a “family friendly” site.

Extensions which don’t meet all four, but do meet at least the first two criteria, will be uploaded to the inform7.com website instead.

Does this sound reasonable?

I think the concern about the inform7.com website is that 6L38 versions not supersede the older versions. There are some projects for which people will want to keep working in 6G60 for whatever reason (most prominently because they might use extensions which aren’t likely to be updated for 6L38 anytime soon), so it’d be really useful for the older versions to remain available.

One solution might be to store both old and new versions where applicable.