After some testing I can say that the four basic operations (union, intersect, diff, symdiff (which is similar to combine, except that it adds nodes where sides intersect)) are very stable. I could not force them to do something wrong or misbehave. The only problem is that when more than one object is selected, these commands only operate on the first two objects while others simply disappear. But I think it will be easy to fix. The quality of these operations seems to be good: no extra points, no curve distortion.
Inset and offset, although very very useful, are unfortunately more buggy. When you do them repeatedly, the number of nodes grows very fast, and soon some very strange artifacts appear (such as dense "clusters" of nodes that really distort the shape). Also, when you do inset or offset to a path with many nodes, it becomes extremely slow, and Inkscape may hang for minutes. Sometimes, a path simply disappears (the object is there, but its d="" attribute is empty).
The outline stroke function works acceptable. Sometimes the strokes are distorted (usually near ends or sharp cusps) but the number of nodes in the resulting shape is not too big, and for simple strokes it gives good results.
Actually, having looked at the patch, I think we really need to leave this 'til the next release. Three reasons: First, it's in C++ and we had decided to hold off on changes that commit us to C++ until 0.37.
What is the value of preserving plain C compilability? Will people complain if we require C++ for 0.36? I, for one, do not care what is the compiler, so long as the program works :)
Second, it's a good bit of code, and deserves to be tested.
The best way to test is to release! We're not doing 1.0, after all. It's just a 0. release.
Third, we will need to do some additional development (buttons, etc.) to integrate it.
I could certainly live without buttons - menu commands and shortcuts are quite enough for the time being. Besides, we could borrow buttons from the other patch, and I think I remember seeing the icons somewhere in the sodipodi innards already.
So my opinion is this: let's include the four boolean operations and outline path for this release, and then help the author debug the inset/offset operations for the next release.
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