In discussion today the subject of our preferences, etc came up. The initial comment was
"also, i really would love to be able to store the inkscape preferences files in a given location (so, to be able to run two builds alternatively without having to save & rename the prefs files manually). profiles!"
Looking into that, it seems that perhaps we should switch some of the mess that is path-prefix.h with the stock calls that now are in glib and that follow the XDG Base Directory Specification
http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec
In fact, we should perhaps look over a few of those "Miscellaneous Utility Functions" in glib http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-Miscellaneous-Utility-Functi...
The immediately useful function would be g_get_user_config_dir().
One main benefit of using that call is that Inkscape should then be easy to direct to different "config" directories and allow for users to pair different versions of Inkscape with different directories... or different work scenarios with different ones, etc.