"Could it be that in recent revisions the spawned python process changes the working directory and starts from '~/.config/inkscape/extensions' and not in the directory that the inkscape-bin process was started from?"
Yes, it's the exact cause. I did this to work around an issue on Windows where Python 2.x can't load any script from an Unicode directory. I assumed that INKSCAPE_EXTENSIONDIR and other defines from prefix.h are always absolute paths.
"Could it be that in recent revisions the spawned python process changes the working directory and starts from '~/.config/ inkscape/ extensions' and not in the directory that the inkscape-bin process was started from?"
Yes, it's the exact cause. I did this to work around an issue on Windows where Python 2.x can't load any script from an Unicode directory. I assumed that INKSCAPE_ EXTENSIONDIR and other defines from prefix.h are always absolute paths.