4 This is GLib version 2.11.2. 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/gtk
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 g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
31 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
32 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
33 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
35 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
36 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
38 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
39 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
42 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
43 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
44 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
45 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
46 support ELF visibility attributes.
48 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
49 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
51 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
52 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
53 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
54 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
55 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
56 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
57 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
58 to help with the transition.
60 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
61 ======================
63 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
64 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
65 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
66 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
67 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
68 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
69 included through <glib.h>.
71 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
72 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
73 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
74 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
75 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
77 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
78 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
79 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
80 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
81 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
83 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
84 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
85 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
86 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
88 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
89 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
90 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
92 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
93 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
94 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
95 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
96 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
97 header files and were never intended to be exported.
99 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
100 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
101 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
102 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
104 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
105 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
106 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
107 stderr if you need to see them.
109 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
110 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
111 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
112 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
113 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
114 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
116 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
117 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
118 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
119 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
120 work with future versions of GLib.
125 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
126 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
127 to create an account for yourself.
129 In the bug report please include:
131 * Information about your system. For instance:
133 - What operating system and version
134 - For Linux, what version of the C library
136 And anything else you think is relevant.
138 * How to reproduce the bug.
140 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
141 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
142 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
143 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
144 of software that can be downloaded.
146 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
147 when the crash occured.
149 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
155 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
156 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
159 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
160 and attach the patch to that bug report.
162 Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword
163 in their keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GLib
164 programming interface, the API keyword should also be included.
166 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU