Inkscape 0.46+devel r22575 on OS X 10.5.8 shows the linked svg file as blue square (as described in comment #6), the status line says: "Image 200 x 200: blue.svg in root". But it isn't inserted as raster image - the XML Editor shows the image attribute 'xlink:href' with the value "blue.svg", not an embedded image with "data:image/png;base64,…"
Inkscape 0.46+devel r22575 on OS X 10.5.8 shows the linked svg file as blue square (as described in comment #6), the status line says: "Image 200 x 200: blue.svg in root". But it isn't inserted as raster image - the XML Editor shows the image attribute 'xlink:href' with the value "blue.svg", not an embedded image with "data:image/ png;base64, …"