4 This is GLib version @GLIB_VERSION@. 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 download locations are:
11 ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib
12 http://download.gnome.org/sources/glib
14 The official web site is:
17 Information about mailing lists can be found at
18 http://www.gtk.org/mailing-lists.php
20 To subscribe, send mail to gtk-list-request@gnome.org
21 with the subject "subscribe".
26 See the file 'INSTALL'
31 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
32 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
33 to create an account for yourself.
35 In the bug report please include:
37 * Information about your system. For instance:
39 - What operating system and version
40 - For Linux, what version of the C library
42 And anything else you think is relevant.
44 * How to reproduce the bug.
46 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
47 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
48 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
49 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
50 of software that can be downloaded.
52 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
53 when the crash occured.
55 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
61 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
62 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
65 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
66 and attach the patch to that bug report.
68 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNU diff.)
73 * It is no longer necessary to call g_type_init(). If you are
74 loading GLib as a dynamic module, you should be careful to avoid
75 unloading it, then subsequently loading it again. This never
76 really worked before, but it is now explicitly undefined behavior.
77 Note that if g_type_init() was the only explicit use of a GObject
78 API and you are using linker flags such as --no-add-needed, then
79 you may have to artificially use some GObject call to keep the
80 linker from optimizing away -lgobject. We recommend to use
81 g_type_ensure (G_TYPE_OBJECT) for this purpose.
83 * This release contains an incompatible change to the g_get_home_dir()
84 function. Previously, this function would effectively ignore the HOME
85 environment variable and always return the value from /etc/password.
86 As of this version, the HOME variable is used if it is set and the
87 value from /etc/passwd is only used as a fallback.
92 * GIO now looks for thumbnails in XDG_CACHE_HOME, following a
93 recent alignment of the thumbnail spec with the basedir spec.
95 * The default values for GThreadPools max_unused_threads and
96 max_idle_time settings have been changed to 2 and 15*1000,
100 =====================
102 * It is no longer necessary to use g_thread_init() or to link against
103 libgthread. libglib is now always thread-enabled. Custom thread
104 system implementations are no longer supported (including errorcheck
107 * The thread and synchronisation APIs have been updated.
108 GMutex and GCond can be statically allocated without explicit
109 initialisation, as can new types GRWLock and GRecMutex. The
110 GStatic_______ variants of these types have been deprecated. GPrivate
111 can also be statically allocated and has a nicer API (deprecating
112 GStaticPrivate). Finally, g_thread_create() has been replaced with a
113 substantially simplified g_thread_new().
115 * The g_once_init_enter()/_leave() functions have been replaced with
116 macros that allow for a pointer to any gsize-sized object, not just a
117 gsize*. The assertions to ensure that a pointer to a correctly-sized
118 object is being used will not work with generic pointers (ie: (void*)
119 and (gpointer) casts) which would have worked with the old version.
121 * It is now mandatory to include glib.h instead of individual headers.
123 * The -uninstalled variants of the pkg-config files have been dropped.
125 * For a long time, gobject-2.0.pc mistakenly declared a public
126 dependency on gthread-2.0.pc (when the dependency should have been
127 private). This means that programs got away with calling
128 g_thread_init() without explicitly listing gthread-2.0.pc among their
131 gthread has now been removed as a gobject dependency, which will cause
132 such programs to break.
134 The fix for this problem is either to declare an explicit dependency
135 on gthread-2.0.pc (if you care about compatibility with older GLib
136 versions) or to stop calling g_thread_init().
138 * g_debug() output is no longer enabled by default. It can be enabled
139 on a per-domain basis with the G_MESSAGES_DEBUG environment variable
141 G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=domain1,domain2
145 Notes about GLib 2.30
146 =====================
148 * GObject includes a generic marshaller, g_cclosure_marshal_generic.
149 To use it, simply specify NULL as the marshaller in g_signal_new().
150 The generic marshaller is implemented with libffi, and consequently
151 GObject depends on libffi now.
153 Notes about GLib 2.28
154 =====================
156 * The GApplication API has changed compared to the version that was
157 included in the 2.25 development snapshots. Existing users will need
160 Notes about GLib 2.26
161 =====================
163 * Nothing noteworthy.
165 Notes about GLib 2.24
166 =====================
168 * It is now allowed to call g_thread_init(NULL) multiple times, and
169 to call glib functions before g_thread_init(NULL) is called
170 (although the later is mainly a change in docs as this worked before
171 too). See the GThread reference documentation for the details.
173 * GObject now links to GThread and threads are enabled automatically
174 when g_type_init() is called.
176 * GObject no longer allows to call g_object_set() on construct-only properties
177 while an object is being initialized. If this behavior is needed, setting a
178 custom constructor that just chains up will re-enable this functionality.
180 * GMappedFile on an empty file now returns NULL for the contents instead of
181 returning an empty string. The documentation specifically states that code
182 may not rely on nul-termination here so any breakage caused by this change
183 is a bug in application code.
185 Notes about GLib 2.22
186 =====================
188 * Repeated calls to g_simple_async_result_set_op_res_gpointer used
189 to leak the data. This has been fixed to always call the provided
192 Notes about GLib 2.20
193 =====================
195 * The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
196 friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
197 with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
198 FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
199 constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
200 POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
201 only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
202 URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
203 looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
204 the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
205 object with the given URI.
207 Notes about GLib 2.18
208 =====================
210 * The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
211 toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
212 generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
213 To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
214 default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
215 To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
217 Notes about GLib 2.16
218 =====================
220 * GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
221 and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
222 --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
224 Notes about GLib 2.10
225 =====================
227 * The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
228 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
229 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
230 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
232 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
233 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
235 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
236 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
239 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
240 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
241 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
242 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
243 support ELF visibility attributes.
245 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
246 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
248 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
249 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
250 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
251 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
252 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
253 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
254 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
255 to help with the transition.
257 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
258 ======================
260 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
261 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
262 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
263 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
264 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
265 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
266 included through <glib.h>.
268 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
269 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
270 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
271 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
272 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
274 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
275 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
276 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
277 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
278 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
280 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
281 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
282 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
283 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
285 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
286 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
287 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
289 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
290 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
291 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
292 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
293 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
294 header files and were never intended to be exported.
296 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
297 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
298 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
299 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
301 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
302 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
303 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
304 stderr if you need to see them.
306 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
307 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
308 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
309 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
310 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
311 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
313 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
314 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
315 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
316 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
317 work with future versions of GLib.