First comments:
- I enabled the Effects menu in preferences.xml and copied the inx and py files from Aaron's tarball into ~/.inkscape/extensions. The new commands are in the menu but don't work. Is this supposed to work? If not why it picks them up for the menu?
- Then I copied them to /usr/local/share/inkscape/extensions/. Now the commands in the menu work, i.e. at least say something in the console. At first I got:
File "/usr/local/share/inkscape/extensions/inkex.py", line 23, in ? import xml.dom.ext ImportError: No module named ext
I installed PyXML. Now I get instead:
File "/usr/local/share/inkscape/extensions/inkex.py", line 25, in ? import xml.xpath ImportError: No module named xpath
What do I need to install now? I see nothing appropriate in the Mandrake repository.
I haven't yet tested on Windows but I still think we must ship Python and all needed Python libs with the Windows package. (Or maybe make two packages, one with extensions and the other without.) This will save a LOT of trouble both to the users and developers. We have a tradition of shipping with "everything included" and it worked out extremely well, so let's stick to that. I think the python interpreter with the minimum of libs can be made quite small.