Hi,
In January I said to you guys "go ahead and use GTKmm, don't worry about dependencies, that's our job" and promptly disappeared for a few months.
Hopefully you accept my apologies - we've made a lot of improvements to autopackage in the meantime with the result that it's now capable of making a competent attempt at installing Inkscape and related dependencies.
Firstly a recap: autopackage is a framework for building Linux binary packages that will install on any reasonably sane/modern Linux distribution[1] to any prefix, whilst taking care of all the fiddly bits like getting the menu integration right, dependency resolution and presenting a nice GUI feedback window while the program is being installed and its dependencies downloaded.
You can read more about it on its website: http://www.autopackage.org/
I've packaged Inkscape, GTKmm and libsigc++ but not popt, libart, gtk2 or libxml2. I think most distros should have these things already. The long term plan is for autopackage to be able to drive apt/yum/urpmi and so on to be able to fetch dependencies not available in .package form from the distros native package repositories if possible. For now that doesn't work, so the user has to resolve those dependencies themselves.
The Inkscape package is built from CVS nightly. It is available here:
http://navi.cx/~mike/inkscape/inkscape-0.39cvs.package
It can be installed like this:
$ wget http://navi.cx/~mike/inkscape/inkscape-0.39cvs.package $ su # bash ./inkscape-0.39cvs.package
In other words, just run it. Currently you should do this from a terminal window, though support from running it directly from file managers is nearly ready (it mostly-sorta works now).
You will be prompted to download the autopackage support code. This should only happen once (until we do a new release of course).
You don't have to run it as root. If you don't, it'll install itself to ~/.local - menus and such should still work theoretically, let us know if they don't.
There is currently no way to uninstall graphically. You must run "package remove inkscape gtkmm libsigc++" as whichever user you installed as to uninstall the packages (assuming all of them were installed by autopackage).
You can remove autopackage itself by running "package remove autopackage-gtk autopackage" as whichever user installed the support code.
"package list" shows what you currently have installed. The summary screen at the end of the install will tell you what autopackage actually put on your system.
Upgrading just involves downloading and running the new package, but our upgrade support is currently pretty weak. It'll just uninstall the old package and install the new one :) There is no way to do this automatically at the moment, you just have to wget the new .package file from my web server.
It is keyed to a testing pre-release of autopackage 0.5, which isn't out yet but will be soon. So, report any bugs you find now :)
If you like you can link to this package from your website. If you do, please put the usual disclaimer about autopackage being beta software etc on it.
thanks -mike
[1] for Inkscape that means any gcc 3.2 system with GTK2, as we need the 3.2 std lib DSO and we haven't packaged GTK2.