4 This is GLib version 2.20.0. GLib is the low-level core
5 library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME. It
6 provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and
7 interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads,
8 dynamic loading, and an object system.
10 The official ftp site is:
11 ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib
13 The official web site is:
16 Information about mailing lists can be found at
17 http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html
19 To subscribe: mail -s subscribe gtk-list-request@gnome.org < /dev/null
20 (Send mail to gtk-list-request@gnome.org with the subject "subscribe")
25 See the file 'INSTALL'
30 ^ The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
31 friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
32 with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
33 FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
34 constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
35 POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
36 only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
37 URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
38 looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
39 the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
40 object with the given URI.
45 * The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
46 toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
47 generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
48 To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
49 default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
50 To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
55 * GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
56 and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
57 --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
62 * The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
63 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
64 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
65 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
67 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
68 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
70 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
71 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
74 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
75 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
76 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
77 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
78 support ELF visibility attributes.
80 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
81 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
83 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
84 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
85 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
86 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
87 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
88 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
89 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
90 to help with the transition.
92 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
93 ======================
95 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
96 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
97 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
98 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
99 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
100 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
101 included through <glib.h>.
103 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
104 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
105 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
106 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
107 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
109 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
110 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
111 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
112 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
113 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
115 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
116 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
117 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
118 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
120 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
121 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
122 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
124 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
125 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
126 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
127 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
128 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
129 header files and were never intended to be exported.
131 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
132 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
133 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
134 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
136 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
137 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
138 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
139 stderr if you need to see them.
141 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
142 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
143 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
144 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
145 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
146 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
148 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
149 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
150 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
151 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
152 work with future versions of GLib.
157 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
158 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
159 to create an account for yourself.
161 In the bug report please include:
163 * Information about your system. For instance:
165 - What operating system and version
166 - For Linux, what version of the C library
168 And anything else you think is relevant.
170 * How to reproduce the bug.
172 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
173 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
174 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
175 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
176 of software that can be downloaded.
178 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
179 when the crash occured.
181 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
187 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
188 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
191 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
192 and attach the patch to that bug report.
194 Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword
195 in their keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GLib
196 programming interface, the API keyword should also be included.
198 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU