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 * The GApplication API has changed compared to the version that was
31 included in the 2.25 development snapshots. Existing users will need
42 * It is now allowed to call g_thread_init(NULL) multiple times, and
43 to call glib functions before g_thread_init(NULL) is called
44 (although the later is mainly a change in docs as this worked before
45 too). See the GThread reference documentation for the details.
47 * GObject now links to GThread and threads are enabled automatically
48 when g_type_init() is called.
50 * GObject no longer allows to call g_object_set() on construct-only properties
51 while an object is being initialized. If this behavior is needed, setting a
52 custom constructor that just chains up will re-enable this functionality.
54 * GMappedFile on an empty file now returns NULL for the contents instead of
55 returning an empty string. The documentation specifically states that code
56 may not rely on nul-termination here so any breakage caused by this change
57 is a bug in application code.
62 * Repeated calls to g_simple_async_result_set_op_res_gpointer used
63 to leak the data. This has been fixed to always call the provided
69 * The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
70 friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
71 with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
72 FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
73 constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
74 POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
75 only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
76 URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
77 looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
78 the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
79 object with the given URI.
84 * The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
85 toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
86 generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
87 To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
88 default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
89 To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
94 * GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
95 and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
96 --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
101 * The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
102 the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
103 doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
104 to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
106 * The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
107 new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
109 * The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
110 POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
113 * 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
114 msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
115 older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
116 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
117 support ELF visibility attributes.
119 * The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
120 allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
122 * A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
123 intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
124 concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
125 inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
126 bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
127 system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
128 carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
129 to help with the transition.
131 Notes about GLib 2.6.0
132 ======================
134 * GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
135 on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
136 returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
137 filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
138 with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
139 header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
140 included through <glib.h>.
142 On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
143 are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
144 library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
145 Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
146 not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
148 To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
149 older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
150 with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
151 compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
152 functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
154 When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
155 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
156 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
157 names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
159 * Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
160 to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
161 applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
163 * The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
164 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
165 with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
166 In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
167 GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
168 header files and were never intended to be exported.
170 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
171 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
172 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
173 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
175 * On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
176 warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
177 "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
178 stderr if you need to see them.
180 * The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
181 thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
182 implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
183 for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
184 maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
185 child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
187 * A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
188 it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
189 connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
190 for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
191 work with future versions of GLib.
196 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
197 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
198 to create an account for yourself.
200 In the bug report please include:
202 * Information about your system. For instance:
204 - What operating system and version
205 - For Linux, what version of the C library
207 And anything else you think is relevant.
209 * How to reproduce the bug.
211 If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
212 in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
213 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
214 As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
215 of software that can be downloaded.
217 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
218 when the crash occured.
220 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
226 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
227 patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
230 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
231 and attach the patch to that bug report.
233 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNUdiff.)