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 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 * It is now allowed to call g_thread_init(NULL) multiple times, and
31 to call glib functions before g_thread_init(NULL) is called
32 (although the later is mainly a change in docs as this worked before
33 too). See the GThread reference documentation for the details.
35 * GObject now links to GThread and threads are enabled automatically
36 when g_type_init() is called.
38 * GObject no longer allows to call g_object_set() on construct-only properties
39 while an object is being initialized. If this behavior is needed, setting a
40 custom constructor that just chains up will re-enable this functionality.
45 * Repeated calls to g_simple_async_result_set_op_res_gpointer used
46 to leak the data. This has been fixed to always call the provided
52 * The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
53 friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
54 with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
55 FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
56 constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
57 POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
58 only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
59 URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
60 looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
61 the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
62 object with the given URI.
67 * The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
68 toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
69 generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
70 To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
71 default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
72 To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
77 * GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
78 and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
79 --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
84 * The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
85 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
86 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
87 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
89 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
90 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
92 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
93 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
96 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
97 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
98 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
99 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
100 support ELF visibility attributes.
102 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
103 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
105 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
106 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
107 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
108 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
109 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
110 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
111 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
112 to help with the transition.
114 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
115 ======================
117 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
118 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
119 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
120 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
121 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
122 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
123 included through <glib.h>.
125 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
126 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
127 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
128 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
129 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
131 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
132 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
133 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
134 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
135 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
137 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
138 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
139 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
140 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
142 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
143 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
144 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
146 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
147 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
148 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
149 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
150 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
151 header files and were never intended to be exported.
153 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
154 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
155 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
156 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
158 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
159 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
160 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
161 stderr if you need to see them.
163 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
164 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
165 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
166 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
167 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
168 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
170 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
171 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
172 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
173 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
174 work with future versions of GLib.
179 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
180 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
181 to create an account for yourself.
183 In the bug report please include:
185 * Information about your system. For instance:
187 - What operating system and version
188 - For Linux, what version of the C library
190 And anything else you think is relevant.
192 * How to reproduce the bug.
194 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
195 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
196 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
197 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
198 of software that can be downloaded.
200 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
201 when the crash occured.
203 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
209 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
210 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
213 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
214 and attach the patch to that bug report.
216 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNUdiff.)