Stats for how our tarball size has changed over different releases:
1.9M inkscape-0.35.tar.gz 1.9M inkscape-0.36.tar.gz 2.5M inkscape-0.37.tar.gz 3.2M inkscape-0.38.1.tar.gz 4.2M inkscape-0.39.tar.gz
I think that's pretty good; I was expecting the size to be about double that. 4.2M should be very little trouble for folks to download. :-)
In the current release, here's a rundown of the top 20 largest files:
1124712 ./share/tutorials/elementsofdesign.sl.svg 1097642 ./share/tutorials/elementsofdesign.svg 899283 ./configure 753019 ./src/Makefile.in 321787 ./share/screens/keys.svg 320641 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-advanced.sl.svg 319166 ./share/screens/keys.sl.svg 295727 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-advanced.svg 292340 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-advanced.fr.svg 266949 ./aclocal.m4 253315 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-basic.sl.svg 245013 ./share/icons/icons.svg 232963 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-basic.ru.svg 231423 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-basic.fr.svg 224177 ./share/tutorials/tutorial-basic.svg 184019 ./ltmain.sh 178732 ./share/tutorials/tipsandtricks.sl.svg 149112 ./share/tutorials/tipsandtricks.svg 142727 ./po/sr.po 141439 ./po/fr.po
Directory sizes:
32K debian 288K doc 5.0M po 6.7M share (largely the tutorials section) 7.2M src
We've batted around the idea of eventually breaking the tutorials out into separate language-specific distribution packages someday maybe in a few releases, especially as we gain additional translations of them. Looks like it isn't a problem right now though.
Bryce