The gnome-inform binaries provided for Debian on the official Inform 7 website were built against Debian 7 “wheezy”.
Wheezy is now not merely oldstable, but oldoldstable; Debian 9 “stretch” was released earlier this year, and when I try to run the official for-use-on-Debian binaries on stretch, they immediately segfault. Being a closed source program, I am not going to try to work out why it segfaults (whereas with an open source program, I would break out gdb and vim and grep and so forth)
You should assume that I have already considered, and discarded as far too much hassle, the notion of setting up a wheezy install in a chroot or on another computer just so that I can run gnome-inform.
EDIT: Apparently it didn’t like the contents of $HOME/Inform, because when I mv’d that out of the way, suddenly it was quite happy to start up.