Interesting about the use of an apt-get variant... does it have the ability to do things like debian-based distros so something like "apt-get build-dep inkscape" would pull down the dependencies? You would need to have the source repos enabled for build-dep to work.
Also, what about the package names, are those debian-like too? So in Ubuntu (probably not quite the same in slack, but could be similar), numpy is python-numpy, gsl is libgsl0-dev and libgsl0ldbl, libxml is python-lxml, and gtkmm is libgtkmm-2.4-dev and libgtkmm-2.4-1c2a.
Hopefully that's helpful...
Cheers,
Josh