We should carefully examine specifications and code on freedesktop.org
freedesktop.org is a website. Really! It contains code and documentation. We could use some of that for KDE, if it suits us. But KDE is a volunteer effort, and we don't have to read any particular website, nor use any particular code, nor implement any particular specifications.
The specs are at http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/Home and include:
The code is at http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Home. It includes stuff like:
Essentially its a hoster, more focussed that Sourceforge, but not that different in some ways.
I think that Ian mistook the some of the implementations (eg. D-BUS, which I think avoided a glib dependency by importing bits of glib :) Update: I was wrong :-(. It doesn't do any such thing.) with the protocols or behaviours that they implement. We generally want a good, stable, interoperable implementation. So do the Gnome guys - at least they claim to, despite their selection of tools. The difference is that we want it in C++ and Qt.
There is nothing that I could see that requires use of Glib in any of the specs that are likely to be important. Sure, we could choose to not re-implement some of the reference implementations (and live with any stability or performance issues), but that isn't a function of the spec, it is about the reference implementations. Would it really take 25K lines of Qt/KDE/C++ code to implement a D-BUS client? I'd hope not, but that is how much C is claimed to be in libdbus.
Now the choice is about what we want to work on. I wish you well in your choices, and remind you that just cause you saw it on the web, it may not be a good idea.
Oh yeah, I'm not sure why Rants is so close to the bottom of the kdedeveloper blog category list. Seems to be what I (and more than a couple of other people around here:)) use.