Raymond Penners wrote:

definitly lacking on some ways that your plugin is good, but
we'd like to start using the extension approach in the
future, and spalah can do some things your code can't.
Also, we really don't want to add a dependency on ming.  I
realize it is a configure option, but the reality is that no
one compiles from source.  If we don't make it the default,
no one will ever see the code.  It's the sad reality of open
source today.

Thanks for your contribution, I hope that you will consider
contributing to Spalah, or to Inkscape in other ways.  Sorry
again to take so long to get back to you.

I am wondering, does this mean that Spalah will be distributed out-of-the box with Inkscape? If not, then IMHO not having a simple "Save as .swf" feature in Inkscape would be a real shame.

Well, we're still trying to figure all that out. On one hand we really want to reduce the size of Inkscape, make it easier to install and faster to load. Which means that we want to make as much external as possible. On the other hand, most people aren't of the mindset to install lots of different packages. On Linux this is pretty easy, most distributions have reasonable package management. On Windows, it is much less so. But it still leaves the issue: how do users know where to go to get these features? We need some way to advertise them also.

I realize that wasn't much of an answer to your question, but that is more because we don't quite have one yet. It's quite a thorny issue.

--Ted