Hi guys,
There's a side issue that's been kicking around for a while now. Inkscape doesn't really have it's dependencies explicitly listed. So things may or may not work for certain users trying to build on certain platforms, OS versions, etc.
For example, I put in a patch recently that uses g_timeout_add_seconds (). In the documentation on it, the function is listed as "Since 2.14". So that bumps the requirement to have glib2 >= 2.14. However that would make things no longer work on Fedora 7 and instead bump Fedora 8 as the minimum there. Since that's only a year old, the might be a bit too soon to bump.
Anyway, this highlights a need we have to be tracking what we bump and what impact it will have. This is something that even non- programmers can help with, so I've added a quick section and link to the Help Wanted wiki page:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ HelpWanted#Determining_Dependencies
A first step would be if people skimmed through the glib and gtk+ docs looking for newer functions. Then adding those that are in our codebase to the "Functions Used" table on the wiki could really help:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ Tracking_Dependencies#Functions_Used
Then if someone has a distro they care about, they can add it and/or fill out details for at at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tracking_Dependencies#Distros
Finally, the developers can get a handle on creeping dependencies, and perhaps add a few #ifdef's or alternate methods where needed in order to keep things sane.