Today I finally made the last changes to remove libgnome and its dependencies from nautilus. Its not in svn yet because some patches to gnome-desktop has to go in first.
Before:
ldd `which nautilus` | wc -l 91
After:
ldd `which nautilus` | wc -l 60
So, we are now linking to 30 libraries less! Libraries which we hardly used but still take time to load, initialize and resolve symbols from.
As a comparison, gtk-demo links to 37 libraries on my system. The additional libraries come from session management, thread use, dbus, gconf, libgnomedesktop and some other nautilus-specific features.
So, Project Ridley is alive and kicking (even if the wiki page is a bit outdated). I’m just waiting for dconf/GtkSettings to be finished and then we’ll really have a competitive next generation platform without all the old deprecated libgnome era stuff.
UPDATE: I’ve now commited this to trunk. You need new gnome-desktop, eel and nautilus