Well, so far so good. I run openSUSE 10.3 at home and the rpm for Inkscape 0.46 that I got from this repo, http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jnweiger/openSUSE_10.3/i586, works flawlessly as far as I can tell. No crashes, no power exits. Seems as stable as 0.45 was. I have used several of the new features and all of them work fine as far as I can tell. The perspective effect has always been a problem for me and most Suse users I imagine. It worked right out of the box, although, I might have already met a dependency somewhere.
I tried compiling Inkscape myself and I tried making an rpm. In both cases I was unsuccessful. I think it was due to not converting the .spec file properly. Ubuntu/Debian and Suse packages have slightly different names so I am sure that I biffed something up there. Best to keep packaging to the experienced anyway (although I am curious about packaging).
I don't have a problem with the Inkscape devs referring to this rpm as "unofficial" for the already stated reasons and I'm happy to see that it has been included on the Inkscape website. However, Lars, this is as "official" as we're going to get at the moment.
heathenx
rygle wrote the following on 4/10/2008 2:26 AM:
Hi Lars,
The only reason the packages are called unnofficial on our download page is because they are not officially built by the Inkscape team. This is because we don't have the internal resources, mainly people who are experienced in the operating system. It doesn't mean they aren't official on the part of Suse, and in fact they are on a Suse website, with some of them marked as not working and others having a big green tick indicating that they work properly.
I think the only real problem with any of these packages would be whether the correct version of the dependencies, ie: the extra programs (like cairo to handle graphics/printing and poppler to read PDF's) that the inkscape code depends on, are there in the system. The packages for Suse Linux 11 would have the appropriate dependencies, while the 10.3 package would probably have more dependencies included in the package as it is an older version of Suse.
I don't have Suse Linux myself, but my educated guess would be that these Suse packages would not have a tick unless all the dependencies are pretty much sorted out. Even if they are not 100% sorted, it will only affect minor elements of Inkscape's overall functionality.
I would be interested to hear from others on their experiences with these packages. Heanthenx??
Same goes for other systems, particularly Fedora - are the instructions on the Inkscape front page and download page correct, and what is your experience with the packages?
Cheers,
Rygle.