You wrote
I've been building inkscape from the svn sources weekly and about two weeks ago the perl option stopped working on my test system. I'm not really sure if it is a problem with inkscape or this system, a Gentoo Linux AMD64 box, so I didn't file a bug report. However, since it seems that a new release is imminent, I'll report this to the list.
./configure --prefix=/opt --with-gnome-print --with-python --with-perl --enable-inkboard --enable-lcms --enable-binreloc
Note that removing '--with-perl' from the configuration options results in a clean build. But perl itself seems to be fine.
You'll also see that compiling without the option will make no difference for work with inkscape, at the moment. This is an experimental option that was only labelled recently as such.
The same applies to --with-python.
ralf