Mike Hearn wrote:
Q: But there are other reasons we are wary of GTKmm! A: Yes. The maintainer of GTKmm is not aware of any building problems on MacOS X however - being standard C++ and given that Apple use gcc, it's hard to imagine where potential problems might come from. Certainly, it would not be hard to port if there were issues. I'm not sure this is a valid reason to avoid GTKmm: if people want to use Inkscape on MacOS then any issues (if there are any) will be worked out. Murray Cumming can comment more on this. DLL bloat: all I can say here is that many, many win32 applications ship with MFC or ATL DLLs so this is hardly a problem unique to ported applications. Certainly the benefits of a good C++ wrapper outweigh the additional download size IMHO.
Actually the main reason to not use gtkmm was that it was an incomplete wrapper - it didn't cover several things that people wanted to use. We're just delaying gtkmm because at this point we have enough other things to fix that starting to use gtkmm would add a further complication.
Your suggestion is a good one (although to those of us that use Debian the dependencies don't seem a bit deal :) perhaps you could start the effort by setting up autopackage with inkscape anyway in such a way as it can be turned off. We can then ship with it and get reports of failure, but are then able to say, didn't work for you? Ok, what machine ... and turn autopackage off and we have a happy customer and a data point for you.
njh