With GNOME 3.0 (april 2011), the GNOME Project decided to discontinue GConf.
It won't be maintained anymore: bugs and security holes will not be fixed.
Thus, pulseaudio shouldn't depend on GConf any longer.
Please, migrate to GSettings.
GStettings is the official GNOME replacement for GConf, and the GNOME project is porting all of its applications to it:
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/GSettingsMigration

You will find the official GConf to GSettings porting guide at:
http://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/ch31.html

GConf is only used by paprefs to configure some things. I don't think GConf ever was the right method of communicating between paprefs and the server, since it doesn't have the network transparency that normal pulseaudio clients have, and I believe GConf isn't available on all the platforms that pulseaudio supports. For these reasons, so I don't really like the idea of moving to GSettings. Instead, we should extend pulseaudio's client-server protocol so that it supports whatever functionality paprefs needs.

Unless this is super-urgent for some reason (are there perhaps distributions that are actively working on getting gconf out of their repositories?), I don't think I will take this task in the near future, so "patches welcome"... Maybe this would be a good project for GSoC?

Recently a bug[1] was reported in debian relating to this problem. It appears that plenty of software has migrated, which understandably means distributors will probably want to get rid of gconf sooner rather than later.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/757909

Adding to my previous comment: making it possible to implement paprefs via the normal client API would be ideal, but probably much more work than converting to GSettings. I'm not strictly against patches that convert the GConf stuff to GSettings.

I don't think I will personally have time to work on this any time soon.

The dependency on gconf is becoming an issue for Debian Sid:

plasma-pa: Depends on gconf
https://bugs.debian.org/886048

According to this bug report, gconf has been replaced by gsettings and its last release has been 5 years ago.

Relevant upstream bug report for that:

386665 - Drop dependency on pulseaudio-gconf?
https://bugs.kde.org/386665

An option might be:

pulseaudio-module-gconf: migration to a dconf PA backend
https://bugs.debian.org/757909

Of course Debian would also need a solution for paprefs, which is the only other dependency on pulseaudio-module-gconf in Debian:

% apt-cache rdepends pulseaudio-module-gconf
pulseaudio-module-gconf
Reverse Depends:
  paprefs
  plasma-pa

(In reply to Tanu Kaskinen from comment #4 from 2014-08-13)
> Adding to my previous comment: making it possible to implement paprefs via
> the normal client API would be ideal, but probably much more work than
> converting to GSettings. I'm not strictly against patches that convert the
> GConf stuff to GSettings.

Tanu, what is the status on this: Did anyone work on extending the client API  or implementing gsettings module in the last years? What is your advice today for plasma-pa and paprefs developers?

There has been some progress on moving to gsettings, but that effort has stalled. Felipe Sateler wrote a good summary here:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2018-March/029718.html

As the pressure to do something increases, I think it's likely that we'll soon move to gsettings, even if that may cause some migration problems for paprefs users.

Regarding plasma-pa, I suggested loading module-switch-on-connect via libpulse when plasma-pa starts, instead of using gconf, and the plasma-pa maintainer seemed receptive to that idea:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95104#c15

I don't know if any patches have been written for plasma-pa since.

This is now fixed in pulseaudio and paprefs.