“One of GNOME’s primary goals is to create a development
framework that makes the programmer’s life easier. This is done in
two ways: by providing libraries for conveniently adding various
features and, more recently, by creating a set of components that
are easily interchanged in larger applications. This goal should be
one of the GNU platform in general. For Free platforms to really
succeed, there needs to be a compelling technical reason for both
users and developers to choose them over proprietary solutions. The
key is integration: both at the application level and the services
level.”
“The GNU platform should consider several of the base GNOME
libraries for GNU-wide usage. The most obvious are Glib, gconf,
gnome-vfs, and bonobo/OAF. None of these libraries require GNOME as
a whole to be installed, and any X requirements are planned to be
eliminated.”
“Glib 2.0 will provide an object system, portable data types,
generally useful data structures, and other functionality. No doubt
much of this is duplicated numerous times in various applications
of the GNU system. Consolidating it into a single library will
benefit all of them: not only will it lower memory usage, but it
provides a single location for code improvement that benefits a
great range of applications and utilities. GConf provides a simple
API for application configuration storage, abstracting the back-end
storage method. Employing this in GNU programs will allow the
consolidation of configuration methods for programs. Not only would
this provide the ability to greatly simplify the /etc configuration
mess, and the array of dotfiles in home directories as Apple’s OS X
was able to do, but it would allow for generic configuration tools
like Linuxconf to be much more successful.”