Hey,
So, I really think that we should entertain the idea of merging the cairo branch into trunk. The plan has been for us to not release 0.49 until it is ready, so the couple outstanding bugs in cairo shouldn't be a huge deterrent. We could also set up a PPA to produce the trunk builds of cairo & pixman so that fixed libs are easily installable in the meantime (at least for people using debian-based systems). I was talking to John Cliff and he put forth a very good point which is that we really need to get as much testing as possible on it prior to a release.
Before it gets asked, yes Jon, color management is broken in it atm. The likelihood of it getting fixed in a branch as opposed to trunk is next to non-existent though...
So, would people be okay with a little breakage of existing functionality to get more testing of a cairofied Inkscape? bulia, I included you in the to line here to help gauge the acceptability of this proposal.
Cheers, Josh