Well, what the hell. Let's try something new and write a diary entry.

Since I'm not worthy of posting replies to the articles (Probably with good reason), I'll reflect on my own meandering experience here instead.

The modest proposal certainly sparked a good amount of discussion, the vast majority of which is of good quality, as lilo observed in a comment towards the bottom (at the time of writing. 'The bottom' was comment #29') A refreshing improvement over the usual Slashdot fare, to be sure. My initial thoughts after reading RyanMuldoon's article were agreeable as far as GLib, more or less agreeable regarding gconf and Bonobo, but uncertain where gnome-vfs is concerned.

The benefits of integrating all of the above libraries are plain, it's simply a matter of if those benefits justify introducing the libraries into a standard GNU environment. With GLib, this is pretty simple. It's a useful library that adds valuable features to any libc environment, so long as it is being put to use. Obviously any system running the Gnome desktop is using it, but at present the use of GLib, afaik, ends there. Would introducing Glib into all GNU environments as a standard library expand that use? Perhaps.

As I see it, there are two ways a library becomes 'standard'. The environment declares "This is standard," or the people declare "We want this to be the standard." Which method is responsible for more standard libraries, or which method yields more successful standards? Personally I would lean towards the latter. If GLib truly belongs in a standard environment, that should become evident naturally as programs beyond the Gnome sphere of influence make use of it.

My familiarity with gconf is virtually nonexistant, so I won't spend too much time blowing smoke. Unix, in its long life, has acquired a rather substantial inertia in many respects to how it works, not the least of which is how configuration is done. This exact issue was discussed at length some time ago on debian-devel, when the suggestion was brought up to move all Debian config files to an XML structure (IIRC, gconf hadn't been written at the time). The idea raises a series of important questions. How do you do that at a distro level without the upstream maintainers adopting the structure? Would they adopt such a structure? Would it become a peculiar feature limited to Debian packages, forcing Debian package maintainers to work that much more? And so on. So, as we ponder gconf, would a 'standard' configuration library be accepted by application writers beyond Gnome's influence? As with GLib (Moreso, actually) I think the best way to determine this is to see if it's being used, rather than push its adoption. I can already hear an argument against this. "But if people aren't aware of gconf or its benefits, how would they know to use it?" Well, that's an education issue. Get the word out. Tutorials, presentations at conventions, articles, and all that good stuff.

And speaking of good stuff, we come to Bonobo. Iain's pipes-for-GUIs comments were right on, I'd say. What I wonder about is if standardizing it in the GNU environment is even necessary, since its usefuless is focused on GUI-type apps. I think wider adoption of Bonobo would serve to benefit applications, though I wonder about apps that, for whatever reason, find themselves wanting to communicate with KDE's component system and Gnome's at the same time. For some reason that seems like it could get hairy. Anyway, I think Bonobo can stand, and thrive, on its own merits without being declared a standard library.

This leaves gnome-vfs. Whatever fate it may bring me, I can at least understand aaronl's reservations about seeing this sort of utility enter a standard environment, but my reasons are somewhat different. Where he sees unnecessary 'over thinking' (for lack of a better term) on the part of the Unix system, I simply see overhead. This is possibly because I'm quite fond of Debian's almost anal habit of breaking packages down into their smallest logical components. This has, for the last five years, consistently yielded a more efficient system that occupies, on average, half as much space as a comporable RedHat-based installation. I like that. So when I imagine a (potentially large) vfs being tied to my system at a relatively low level, I can't help but worry. As egnor quickly pointed out, wget | wc -w works just fine. :) Would it be cool to grep a web page without a pipe? Sure. I could think of countless uses for my standard Unix commands to take URLs as parameters, but is it the right thing to do? Well, that's certainly not my call.

Back to work.