Here's a much more techie task we need done.
Over the past several releases there's been some observations of slowness in the Inkscape renderer. We'd all like Inkscape to be nice and snappy, even for huge documents.
However, we've not really had good, standardish ways of measuring performance. A good way of measuring it would be helpful in several ways: It'd help developers quickly see if a change improves or degrades performance; it'd enable us to track performance from release to release; and, it'd be a tool we could add new performance "Problem Cases" to as we go.
The task is to create a collection of scripts that one can run on a copy of inkscape, that exercise it in some different ways and records the speed it did each thing.
Right now, you can do some testing by just running Inkscape in cmdline mode on a large .svg file, and time how long it takes for Inkscape to startup, create the .png, and exit.
(Later, maybe we can add some testing triggers inside the code so we can better measure performance of particular pieces (like just the startup time, just the gui init, etc.) Also, later hopefully we'll have some internal scripting or Atk support to allow further automated testing of the app. But static runs should be enough to give us some good info to start with.)
It would be interesting to run this performance suite against older versions of the software, and measure how performance has changed over time. It'd be especially cool if this could produce an SVG graph. :-)
Bryce