Just to give some visibility into some of the work bubbling away these days:
Build system: There is definitely a concensus that our current build system sucks. Options include CMAKE, Bob's buildtool, or just a cleaned up automake. We really need to have interested parties mind meld and find a single solution.
CMAKE is ok. It is well supported and can generate pseudo-native projects for a number of compilers in addition to plain makefiles. But I do find it kind of a pain in the butt to use and a little bit confusing.
I don't think a cleaned up automake will help Windows users much. But I could be wrong. The only way I know to build on Windows is using buildtool. Maybe cleaned up automake could make things working with MSYS/Cygwin? It would be nice to be able to use other compilers, but on the other hand mandating GCC eliminates a lot of headaches.
I'm not sure why buildtool was really necessary in the first place given the number of build systems already out there. But of the ones I'm familiar with, buildtool looks to be most similar to "Bakefiles" (http://www.bakefile.org/) used and created by the wxWidgets folks. At least they're similar in the sense that both chose to use xml for some (IMHO misguided) reason. Build descriptions are not tree-structured data so XML doesn't really make so much sense to me. Lisp or scheme (guile?) make more sense if you want something that's easy to parse and is capable of describing both data and execution flow succinctly.
There's also SCONS, but it doesn't come with a lot of built-in logic for building cross-platform apps. It's more like a 'make' replacement on steroids than an autotools replacement. But python already seems to be a big part of Inkscape so maybe it makes sense to go with SCONS. Blender has a SCONS building system now.
Version control system: Mental has been experimenting with git and trying to get it to operate with svn. This study is still very early on, but if it works out well, one day we may begin encouraging developers to use git.
Have you looked at Monotone?
My problem with git is that the community seems very uninterested in providing a cross-platform tool. The attitude seems to be: git is for working on the Linux kernel and if you're not working on the Linux kernel or not working on Linux, then good luck. The best answer I could get when looking into git for accessing the Cairo sources was that "I should be able to get git to compile under cygwin." I can't remember if I tried or not. I think I tried and it didn't work for some reason so I gave up because I really only needed a snapshot of the Cairo src.
On the other hand Monotone seems to be much more cross-platform friendly, with clients _prebuilt_ for various platforms and linked to right from the project's front page. A little digging also turns up various GUI clients, too.
(To be honest, I actually only know about Monotone because it's what the Gaim -- now Pidgin -- folks just announced they're switching to, but that's endorsement enough for me.)
Looking now, I see git is available precompiled from Cygwin at last, but I still get an uneasy feeling about relying on a tool that is so unapologetically Linux-centric as the backbone for a cross-platform app like Inkscape. Platform-specific issues like line-end translation do exist, and I would be surprised if Git devs proved to be very receptive about dealing with such issues since they can't even be bothered to make link for a Mac or Windows client on their web Page. Monontone, on the other hand has links for Win, Mac, rpm and a slew of deb formats right there on page 1.
--bb