On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Alan Cox wrote:
Gconf doesn't need gnome. The reverse is true however. The XML format also lets you work with prefences using styles and XML XSLT and the like which is very powerful when working with a large number of systems. Really nobody has scratched the surface of what it can do.
http://www.libelektra.org/GConf has a whole list of reasons why they feel gconf would be a bad choice (at least in its current form) for the system configuration api. A few example it has a lot more library dependencies, was not designed with a global namespace in mind, "GConf storage backend uses XML files, which are big, take long time and system resources to parse or update.", Eletkra has the concepts of "backends" of which gconf is one.
I dunno if Elektra is the right solution, but they seem to have some good arguments.
Shane