Dear Maintainers,
updating the German translation of the package description (1) I found
that the short description does not give any hint to me why I should
need the library. And I'm also aware of the fact that I am talking
about an academic problem as the library is already installed on the
majority of systems.


Description: GLib library of C routines
  GLib is a library containing many useful C routines for things such
  as trees, hashes, lists, and strings.  It is a useful general-purpose
  C library used by projects such as GTK+, GIMP, and GNOME.
  .
  This package contains the shared libraries.


I think every library written in C contains some useful routines. And
there is a slight discrepancy between short description and second
paragraph: library vs. libraries. Actually libraries is correct, but
might benefit from some kind of explanation.

Perhaps the description would benefit from using some upstream (2)
information:


   GLib provides the core application building blocks for libraries
   and applications written in C. It provides the core object system
   used in GNOME, the main loop implementation, and a large set of
   utility functions for strings and common data structures.


In the file list (3) I found the names of the libraries:

   libglib, gio-querymodules, glib-compile-schemas, libgio,
   libgmodule, libgobject, libgthread

Perhaps a new description could start like this:

Description: GLib - GNOME infrastructure library
  GLib provides the core object system used in GNOME, the main
  loop implementation, and a large set of utility functions for
  strings and common data structures.

The second paragraph is beyond my scope. Ideas:

  1) This package contains some special purpose libraries compiled
     from the GLib sources.

  2) This package contains the libglib, gio-querymodules,
     glib-compile-schemas, libgio, libgmodule, libgobject,
     and libgthread libraries.

  3) This package contains libraries for IO, object and
     thread handling as well as ..

Kind regards,
   Martin

1: http://ddtp.debian.net/ddt.cgi?desc_id=87987
2: http://developer.gnome.org/glib/
3: http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/libglib2.0-0/filelist

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
[...]
things from an outsider's point of view, and you're better off asking
someone else, like Wikipedia:

# GLib is a cross-platform software utility library that began as part
# of the GTK+ project. However, before releasing version 2 of GTK+,
# the project's developers decided to separate non-GUI-specific code
# from the GTK+ platform, thus creating GLib as a separate product.
# GLib was released as a separate library so other developers, those
# that did not make use of the GUI-related portions of GTK+, could
# make use of the non-GUI portions of the library without the overhead
# of depending on a full-blown GUI library.

Freshmeat has:
# GLib is a library containing many useful C routines for things such
# as trees, hashes, and lists. GLib was previously distributed with
# the GTK toolkit, but has been split off as of the developers'
# version 1.1.

If you follow Wikipedia's links you'll see that GTK(+) was originally
written for the GIMP; far from being specific to the GNOME desktop,
GLib can be pulled in even on a barebones X-less backup-server (as a
dependency for amanda).  I'd suggest a synopsis along the lines of:

  Description: basic C utilities from GTK+

There's no point calling it either a library or set of libraries when
we already know it's a lib- in Section: libs.

The existing long description is already quite good, but maybe we
could bulk it out with some historical context:

   GLib is a set of useful C routines for handling data structures such as
   trees, hashes, and lists. It was originally part of the Gimp ToolKit,
   now the basis of the GNOME project, but it was split off to form an
   independent, non-GUI-specific resource.

Wikipedia itemises its components as "GObject, Glib, GModule, GThread,
GIO", but that's only true since GTK+2; for all I know it might need
updating by the time Wheezy goes stable, so I'm not sure it's wise to
make the description any more specific than it is at present.

I wasn't going to bother giving a patch until I saw some of the other
descriptions in the same control file that I could de-garble in
passing.

Copied from the proposed patch:

Package: libglib2.0-bin
  Section: misc
@@ -72,13 +72,13 @@
  Conflicts: libglib2.0-0 (<< 2.25.11-2),
  Replaces: libglib2.0-0 (<< 2.25.11-2),
            libglib2.0-dev (<< 2.25.11-2)
-Description: Programs for the GLib library
- GLib is a library containing many useful C routines for things such
- as trees, hashes, lists, and strings.  It is a useful general-purpose
- C library used by projects such as GTK+, GIMP, and GNOME.
+Description: basic C utilities from GTK+ - binaries
+ GLib is a set of useful C routines for handling data structures such as
+ trees, hashes, and lists. It was originally part of the Gimp ToolKit,
+ now the basis of the GNOME project, but it was split off to form an
+ independent, non-GUI-specific resource.
   .
- This package contains the program files which is used for the libraries
- and others.
+ This package contains some simple commandline utilities for GLib.

I wonder whether the new wording is correct. For my German thinking a
library is to be used/shared by programs and not the other way round.
Actually the package page (1) shows that libglib2.0 is a dependency of this
package. If things are not different in English, the sentence should be
something like

"This package contains some commandline utilities using GLib."

1: http://packages.debian.org/sid/libglib2.0-bin

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:

 - gdbus: its main purpose is (?) monitoring DBus activity in
   order to debug apps that use glib.

 - gsettings: a simple commandline interface to the GSettings
   facility.  It lets you get and set keys, and to monitor an
   individual key for changes.

   A typical use might be (?) in a script or shell snippet for
   the user to paste to dump settings or change a setting.

   The gdm3 package dependency on libglib2.0-bin might be due
   to this tool.

 - glib-compile-schemas: converts from text to a binary format
   that apps using GSettings use.  Just a symlink, presumably
   because libglib2.0-0 already needs this functionality.

 - gio-querymodules: symlink to /usr/lib/glib-2.0/gio-querymodules

Maybe something along these lines (warning: not fact-checked):

	This package contains some low-level commandline utilities for
	working with GLib facilities.  In particular, it contains
	a tool for tracing GDBus activity (gdbus) and a tool for
	getting, setting, and monitoring configuration stored using
	backends GSettings understands (gsettings).