Comment 3 for bug 169094

Originator: YES

When inkscape saves a temporary copy of the svg file for reading by
extensions, it rewrites the sodipodi:docbase attribute. As far as I can
tell, this means that extensions do not have access to the base directory
name, and so can't resolve relative paths.

The reason this doesn't break more things more often is that inkscape by
default adds a sodipodi:absref tag to imported images, which extensions,
such as embedimages.py, default to when they can't resolve the relative
path. I ran into this bug when trying to run this extension on an SVG not
created by inkscape, which only stored the relative path to the file.

I see that there has been a lot of work on getting relative paths to work
as users expecr ( +relative +(path OR paths) brings up 20+ hits in the
bug-tracker). No matter what model of priority of relative and absolute
links is adopted, however, I think the behavior should be consistent
between core code and extensions.