A ticket's was opened recently to try to get a more recent version Inkscape marked stable in Gentoo, and over the past couple of days some progresshas been made:

http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=inkscape

amd64, ppc64, and sparc are at 0.40 or 0.41. No word yet on x86; it's still at 0.37...

Bryce