I've been kicking this idea around since the last release, and would like to put it out for discussion for us to do in 0.47...
Extensions have proven to be a great way for people to contribute new ideas to the project, but unfortunately the maturity, quality, and maintenance put into the extensions can vary quite a bit. Unfortunately, a consequence is that they complicate our core Inkscape codebase releases.
* Old extensions sometimes break, but their original developers aren't available to fix them. It's a regression, but is it important enough to block the release?
* Extensions are quick to write, yet having to wait a full Inkscape development cycle to get them formally distributed to users seems rather excessive.
* While extensions won't make Inkscape crash, they certainly can have serious bugs, but it's currently hard to roll fixes out to users. We wouldn't roll a new point-release of inkscape just to fix extension bugs.
It seems that a logical solution would be to establish an inkscape extensions package separate from the Inkscape core, that could be released with more or less frequency, as appropriate.
Along with that would be an 'unstable' extension package, that would contain scripts not as ready.
I think our existing release processes could handle this additional package; it'd just be one additional piece to rev and upload. However, I would love to see a new team of extension writers form around this and take ownership of maintaining it and producing releases as appropriate (and hopefully more frequently than the core codebase).
Let me know your thoughts.
Bryce