# Part III. GSF: Dependencies

GSF depends on the following libraries:

GLib | A general-purpose utility library, not specific to graphical user interfaces. GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on.
Libxml2 | A library that provides a parser and toolkit for XML, the Extensible Markup Language. XML is a metalanguage used to define markup languages (text languages where structure and semantics are added to the content using extra "markup" information).

The core GSF library can be built to also utilize the following libraries:

zlib | A data compression library that implements the DEFLATE algorithm used in gzip.
libbz2 | A data compression library that implements the algorithm used in bzip2.

A separate GSF library can be built that offers additional functionality for use in the GNOME desktop environment. That library has the following additional requirements:

libbonobo-2.0 | Bonobo is the GNOME architecture for creating reusable software components and compound documents.
gnome-vfs-2.0 | GnomeVFS is a filesystem abstraction library that allows applications plugable transparent access to a variety of "real" filesystems, including networked filesystems like WebDAV, storage on devices like digital cameras, to the local filesystem.