I've been examining our options for importing postscript without requiring a bajillion evil dependencies, and I think I've arrived at a plan.
1) write a postscript to SVG converter in Postscript and use that for our Postscript importer
2) write a bare-bones standalone Postscript interpreter (doesn't need to implement any rendering, just provide a dummy postscipt device) and ship it with Inkscape
Until #2 is finished, we can run the converter using Ghostscript, which is still two fewer dependencies than before.
I've got prototypes for both #1 and #2 in CVS in the module 'ps3convert'.
The prototype interpreter is written in Ruby and isn't really functional yet, but the converter (currently encapsulated in the ps-svg shell script) already works for the basic stuff.
Running the converter:
./ps-svg blah.ps > blah.svg
Caveats with the converter:
* it's a proof-of-concept; hence the code is horribly ugly
* it doesn't yet do text, gradients or clipping paths
* the image in the output SVG appears above the top of the page, so you have to scroll up to see it
Also one last caveat: I'm not promising any timetables on this stuff. So don't bug me to finish it. You'll probably find giving me patches to be the more productive alternative.
-mental