I think a patch would be well-received, at least so that everyone can try out the behaviours you are suggesting. They sound reasonable to me.
Is there generic convex-hull code in inkscape? I was poking around libnr and it appears that there is something called convex-hull in there, but that apparently only stores bounds as a rect, not as a real convex hull (i.e. it just keeps track of the bounding box). I started writing my nice little implementation of Graham Scan, but then realized I was creating lots of little helper functions and whatnot, cluttering up the namespace. Before I get too far into this:
1. Would it be appropriate to create a real Convex Hull class in NR (or modify the existing one) such that you could call either: ConvexHull c(stl-container-of-points) or just do: ConvexHull c; c.add(p1) ... (where the points are NR points)?
2. Or, do people think that simply snapping to the bounding rectangle formed by the set of points should be sufficient?
Thanks again, ...Eric