Alright…this is going to be a little rough and not quite as thorough as I would like but I wanted to document it now while it was fresh in my mind. After visiting this site and this site I was able to cobble some steps together to build a debian package of a recent Inkscape development release for Ubuntu Hardy. This may not work for everyone but it worked for me and I was able to use the deb package on a newly installed version of Ubuntu Hardy to make sure it worked.

Here are the steps that I took:

1.)  Install the necessary packages to build Inkscape (some tools may not be needed)

sudo apt-get install autotools-dev fakeroot dh-make build-essential autoconf automake intltool libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libgc-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libxslt1-dev libboost-dev libpopt-dev libgsl0ldbl libgsl0-dev libgsl0-dbg libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev libssl-dev libmagick++9-dev libwpg-dev

2.)  Download a recent devel tarball from Inkscape Subversion Snapshots

save inkscape-XXXXX.tar.bz2 to /home/user dir.

3.)  Untar inkscape-XXXXX.tar.bz2 to /home/user. This will make a new dir called inkscape-XXXX

4.)  Make the debian control files:

dh_make --createorig

Pick Single for single binary
Fill in any extra information like maintainer and version

5.)  Run the following:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

If everything goes as planned and after a long wait you should get:
inkscape_XXXXXX-1_i386.deb in your /home/user dir.

I haven’t yet figured out how to install this package or prepare it to run along side the stable 0.46 release. If anyone knows how then please give me a jingle.

Here’s my deb package of Inkscape 0.46+devel revision 19107, July 2, 2008:

inkscape_19107-1_i386.deb

Use it at your own risk and don’t bitch at me if it doesn’t work. You can always uninstall it and go back to the stable release. I am really looking forward to Inkscape 0.47. They are woring on some really neat features like Spiro, Live Path Effects and Filter Effects. Check it out.

By the way, this was my first deb package. I didn’t adhere to the Debian package standards.