Probably this already exists but I have not been able to find it. Given two paths:

A. curvy linear
B. closed path which is an arbitrary shape, for instance a triangle.

How would one drop, for instance, 10 copies of B along A, evenly spaced along the path with one at each end? In the present case the instances of B should remain in their original orientation, but I can think of other applications where it should rotate with the normal of the corresponding position on Path A.

Possible???

The closest I got so far was to select A, select dots, convert path to dashes. That made a spot at every place I wanted a symbol. But there was no way to convert each of those spots to a copy of B.

Thanks.

I did try "pattern along path" in the path effect editor, and after much futzing around figured out how to get it to place the pattern (cut pattern first, then use icon in dialog to paste). However, it distorts the pasted pattern, and there seems to be no way to turn that off or disable the rotation with the normal. Some other way to do this?

Ah, getting closer. "scatter" in extensions -> generate from path gets rid of the distortion and rotation problems. However it does not appear to support drawing overlapping patterns. At least setting the various numbers in the range -1 to 1 didn't result in any overlaps.

Awesome, I love it when people ask a question and then try to answer it themselves! Seriously

Also try the Spray tool. I don't think you can get evenly spaced, but maybe tweaking settings you can.

And also look at Markers. I think markers will be the best bet. This is in Fill and Stroke dialog > Stroke style tab. And you can draw your own markers, and use Object menu > Object to Marker. Then on line A, place a node wherever you want a marker.

Possibly you could get something close to that with Tiled Clones (Edit menu > Clones). Especially I'm thinking because you can rotate the clone along the way (line A) (if you want).