Pidgin Shouldn't Require GConf...

[jpeddicord]

unfortunately, programming-wise, that's not how it works. if you want to use gconf you need to compile your application against gconf libraries and that's what a dependency is.

Not entirely true. You can introduce a new run-time dependency without building against a library at all. See dlopen for information. It's handy in Python, for example, when using a C library that doesn't have a Python counterpart. Wikipedian example:

void* sdl_library = dlopen("libSDL.so", RTLD_LAZY);
if(sdl_library == NULL) {
   // report error ...
} else {
   // use the result in a call to dlsym
}

So, technically, Pidgin, Firefox, or any other application could check for the existence of the GConf library, and if it exists, dlopen it and do what's needed. If it doesn't, they could fall back to something else.

[del_diablo]

2) what is wrong with having gnome dependencies, it's muuuch better than somebody reinventing the wheel every, especially if these are non-gui dependencies.

GNOME is the bloatest thing ever for a normal working system.
But hey, lets hope all your favorite apps get tied down to BLOTGNOME and lags to death.

[Xbehave]

GNOME is the bloatest thing ever for a normal working system.
But hey, lets hope all your favorite apps get tied down to BLOTGNOME and lags to death.

A nice rational argument about why not to use gconf, because GNOME is "bloated". I could explain that the whole point of seperate libraries is that you can pull in parts of the functionality without the "bloat" of the rest of gnome, but I doubt you care as you probably consider everything that uses more than 64k "bloat".

[falconindy]

GNOME is the bloatest thing ever for a normal working system.
But hey, lets hope all your favorite apps get tied down to BLOTGNOME and lags to death.

So, what do you use? DWM? Rat Poison? XMonad? Screen? Did you post this from elinks?

[phrostbyte]

Just what everybody wants, to have to enter the same proxy information into several different apps...

It would be better if Firefox read the proxy information from gconf as well. Same goes for reading the information from KDE, XFCE, etc.

I smell a new freedesktop.org standard.