While writing the proposal for a better bucket tool, I kept thinking that it would be much easier to make a vector based fill tool, that later gets the ability to automatically close gaps by creating lines before applying the operation.
You can already emulate a vector based bucket tool in a kind of a hackish way:
It would be great if this approach gets properly implemented as a bucket fill mode.
It would also be great if created in this fashion fills get a slight OUTSET operation applied to them, so as to get the fill border be precisely under the middle of the lineart lines.
The tricky part is in teaching the software where to close the gaps.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/CloseGapsExample3.pngIt must also favor the ends/tips of lineart. See above picture for example.
Even without it, closing gaps manually and then filling in a vector based fashion still leaves the artist with less cleanup work than using the current bucket tool in many cases.
It creates much more precise fill shapes, mimicking the nodes of the corresponding line-art.
That is why I suggested as one of the approaches to the issue to implement it as an alternative fill mode. Because while precise vector filling is great for clean lineart, it is not as powerful in some cases as the current bucket fill - or it will take some time until it is on par in terms of extra features.
