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/mailing-lists.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 no longer necessary to use g_thread_init() or to link against
31 libgthread. libglib is now always thread-enabled.
33 * The g_once_init_enter()/_leave() functions have been replaced with
34 macros that allow for a pointer to any gsize-sized object, not just a
35 gsize*. The assertions to ensure that a pointer to a correctly-sized
36 object is being used will not work with generic pointers (ie: (void*)
37 and (gpointer) casts) which would have worked with the old version.
42 * GObject includes a generic marshaller, g_cclosure_marshal_generic.
43 To use it, simply specify NULL as the marshaller in g_signal_new().
44 The generic marshaller is implemented with libffi, and consequently
45 GObject depends on libffi now.
50 * The GApplication API has changed compared to the version that was
51 included in the 2.25 development snapshots. Existing users will need
62 * It is now allowed to call g_thread_init(NULL) multiple times, and
63 to call glib functions before g_thread_init(NULL) is called
64 (although the later is mainly a change in docs as this worked before
65 too). See the GThread reference documentation for the details.
67 * GObject now links to GThread and threads are enabled automatically
68 when g_type_init() is called.
70 * GObject no longer allows to call g_object_set() on construct-only properties
71 while an object is being initialized. If this behavior is needed, setting a
72 custom constructor that just chains up will re-enable this functionality.
74 * GMappedFile on an empty file now returns NULL for the contents instead of
75 returning an empty string. The documentation specifically states that code
76 may not rely on nul-termination here so any breakage caused by this change
77 is a bug in application code.
82 * Repeated calls to g_simple_async_result_set_op_res_gpointer used
83 to leak the data. This has been fixed to always call the provided
89 * The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
90 friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
91 with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
92 FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
93 constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
94 POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
95 only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
96 URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
97 looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
98 the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
99 object with the given URI.
101 Notes about GLib 2.18
102 =====================
104 * The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
105 toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
106 generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
107 To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
108 default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
109 To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
111 Notes about GLib 2.16
112 =====================
114 * GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
115 and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
116 --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
118 Notes about GLib 2.10
119 =====================
121 * The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
122 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
123 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
124 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
126 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
127 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
129 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
130 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
133 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
134 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
135 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
136 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
137 support ELF visibility attributes.
139 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
140 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
142 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
143 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
144 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
145 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
146 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
147 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
148 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
149 to help with the transition.
151 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
152 ======================
154 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
155 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
156 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
157 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
158 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
159 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
160 included through <glib.h>.
162 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
163 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
164 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
165 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
166 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
168 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
169 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
170 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
171 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
172 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
174 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
175 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
176 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
177 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
179 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
180 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
181 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
183 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
184 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
185 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
186 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
187 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
188 header files and were never intended to be exported.
190 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
191 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
192 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
193 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
195 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
196 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
197 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
198 stderr if you need to see them.
200 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
201 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
202 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
203 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
204 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
205 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
207 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
208 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
209 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
210 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
211 work with future versions of GLib.
216 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
217 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
218 to create an account for yourself.
220 In the bug report please include:
222 * Information about your system. For instance:
224 - What operating system and version
225 - For Linux, what version of the C library
227 And anything else you think is relevant.
229 * How to reproduce the bug.
231 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
232 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
233 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
234 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
235 of software that can be downloaded.
237 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
238 when the crash occured.
240 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
246 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
247 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
250 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
251 and attach the patch to that bug report.
253 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNUdiff.)