Bulia tells me there will soon be an extensions menu. I'm interested in writing some extensions in Perl. My motivation is to scratch my own itch, but some of the stuff I write might be of interest to other users as well. So far I've just been writing Perl scripts to manipulate SVG files, and running them from the command line. Is there an API for extensions yet? The simplest thing would probably be to do it through a shell, and provide a way to hook the command-line options and arguments up to a dialog box in the GUI. There would need to be provisions for internationalization, and for error reporting (including errors resulting from not having the right Perl modules installed).
However, since Inkscape runs on Windows, running it in a shell might not work. Is the Extensions menu envisioned as a Unix-only feature? It seems like it would be quite complicated to implement such a thing on a cross-platform basis. It's easy to write the scripts to be platform-independent, but, e.g., most Windows users aren't going to have Active State Perl installed, and even if you embedded a Perl interpreter in Inkscape, that would only work for Perl, and there would still be the issue of libraries. Even if you told Windows users they were required to install Perl and a certain set of libraries, it would also be complex to try to write the glue between Inkscape and Perl in a platform-independent way. And my experience from writing a cross-platform Perl app is that it's a lot of work in terms of testing and code maintenance, much more than writing a Unix-only app.