Comment 3 for bug 709961

Well, another solution, which I saw mentioned by Alexandre Prokoudine in the linked bug report, could be

"what Rosegarden, a free MIDI sequencer, does: on startup it checks for missing components and lists what features will be absent in human readable form."

I have also seen K3B, the disc burning application, do a similar thing.

Basically, there needs to be some sort of system that informs the user of any missing functionality and what additional packages are needed to enable it--instead of just silently disabling missing functionality so that the user isn't even aware that Inkscape has or could have that functionality.