Agree with that entirely.
 
In that context, I'd place Trace Bitmap at 2 or 3. It's hard for me to imagine working with Inkscape in the professional graphics world without it. I used it twice today, and that was a light day where I'm mostly using GIMP. It's true you can get by without it, but life would suck. ;P
That's probably why it's up at the top three functions in the Path menu.

-C

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
On Wed, 2015-12-02 at 12:48 +0000, C R wrote:
> At the same time, I use Trace Bitmap pretty constantly. It is such a
> an immensely useful feature that I think it's worth making sure
> Potrace is installed as a dependency of Inkscape, unless there is a
> particularly compelling reason why it isn't.
>
Aye it probably should. But I'd have a couple of levels of attachment:

1. core (wouldn't work at all with it)
2. strongly recommended (always required in debian)
3. somewhat recommended (always suggested in debian)
4. plugins and others (separate)

I'd actually only remove menu entries for 4. and disable them (grey out)
if they are 2 or 3. That way the functionality if sign posted in
context, without letting the user do something that might break
inkscape.

Best Regards, Martin Owens