I'm only lurking here for a short time but will try to answer:
You wrote
- I'd be interested in helping out with the Gtkmm work, so I'm curious
about the state of affairs in that department. Does the current gtkmm stuff live in a separate branch in CVS?
No. It's compiled in and can be accessed with inkscape --new-gui
to try to get a better understanding of where you're headed (are these documents fairly up to date btw?).
I think you'll find the latest with searching in the dev archives.
- Cairo is something else I'm interested in, but I'm guessing this is
a bit further down the road?
I've heard it's already working but the plan is to wait until the speed is in inkscape's order of magnitude.
- It would be nice to have faster rendering of the documents under
windows (I think I read a bug report on this). Is there any interest in profiling and optimising the current code, or is the move to Cairo as a vector drawing backend meant to take care of this so that it would just be a waste of time?
Cannot comment on that but the code has several strata and I doubt a short-time effort will result in overall (!) speedups.
In any case, I'll start out with familiarising myself with the current codebase first. If any of you current developers have any small/minor tasks I could get my feet wet in that would be great (speaking of which: is the InkscapeJanitors page in the Wiki still valid?)
Yes, and the bug tracker, too. After two patches, you'll get the blessings. Good luck!
ralf