On Feb 17, 2010, at 7:58 AM, william.crocker@...2677... wrote:
The Inkscape development community appears to live in a utopian world unbridled by the logistic and economic forces which tend to dominate our decisions in the corporate world.
We all have Linux boxes on our desks because of the scale of processes we run. We can't afford to do our own system administration and our system administrators are not going to install a parallel, virtual operating system (Fedora) so that we can run some obscure vector drawing application (No matter how great it is. :-) )
No, not at all.
In fact I for one live in a world where we try to support as old/weak hardware as possible. Among other things, this allowed modern Inkscape to be built for the original Eee PC's Xandros distro, etc. We go to great pains to ensure we only bump up the dependencies when absolutely necessary, and have a very wide range of supported OS versions.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tracking_Dependencies#Distros
Remember, not only are you running something that is based on Fedora 3 while the main Fedora is up to release 13, but you are running on a corporate product that has hit its end of life wind-down phase while its replacement has been out for three years now.
Given all that, the burden is a bit on the end user (you and your fellows) to help with specifics and to be willing to spend time in our chat room to get help building the latest-and-greatest for such phasing-out distros.