dynamic loading, and an object system.
The official ftp site is:
- ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk
+ ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib
The official web site is:
http://www.gtk.org/
See the file 'INSTALL'
+Notes about GLib 2.20
+=====================
+
+^ The functions for launching applications (e.g. g_app_info_launch() +
+ friends) now passes a FUSE file:// URI if possible (requires gvfs
+ with the FUSE daemon to be running and operational). With gvfs 2.26,
+ FUSE file:// URIs will be mapped back to gio URIs in the GFile
+ constructors. The intent of this change is to better integrate
+ POSIX-only applications, see bug #528670 for the rationale. The
+ only user-visible change is when an application needs to examine an
+ URI passed to it (e.g. as a positional parameter). Instead of
+ looking at the given URI, the application will now need to look at
+ the result of g_file_get_uri() after having constructed a GFile
+ object with the given URI.
+
+Notes about GLib 2.18
+=====================
+
+* The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
+ toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h and gio.h. GLib enforces this by
+ generating an error when individual headers are directly included.
+ To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by
+ default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO).
+ To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.
+
+Notes about GLib 2.16
+=====================
+
+* GLib now includes GIO, which adds optional dependencies against libattr
+ and libselinux for extended attribute and SELinux support. Use
+ --disable-xattr and --disable-selinux to build without these.
+
+Notes about GLib 2.10
+=====================
+
+* The functions g_snprintf() and g_vsnprintf() have been removed from
+ the gprintf.h header, since they are already declared in glib.h. This
+ doesn't break documented use of gprintf.h, but people have been known
+ to include gprintf.h without including glib.h.
+
+* The Unicode support has been updated to Unicode 4.1. This adds several
+ new members to the GUnicodeBreakType enumeration.
+
+* The support for Solaris threads has been retired. Solaris has provided
+ POSIX threads for long enough now to have them available on every
+ Solaris platform.
+
+* 'make check' has been changed to validate translations by calling
+ msgfmt with the -c option. As a result, it may fail on systems with
+ older gettext implementations (GNU gettext < 0.14.1, or Solaris gettext).
+ 'make check' will also fail on systems where the C compiler does not
+ support ELF visibility attributes.
+
+* The GMemChunk API has been deprecated in favour of a new 'slice
+ allocator'. See the g_slice documentation for more details.
+
+* A new type, GInitiallyUnowned, has been introduced, which is
+ intended to serve as a common implementation of the 'floating reference'
+ concept that is e.g. used by GtkObject. Note that changing the
+ inheritance hierarchy of a type can cause problems for language
+ bindings and other code which needs to work closely with the type
+ system. Therefore, switching to GInitiallyUnowned should be done
+ carefully. g_object_compat_control() has been added to GLib 2.8.5
+ to help with the transition.
+
Notes about GLib 2.6.0
======================
on-disk encoding on Unix, but UTF-8 on Windows. All GLib functions
returning or accepting pathnames have been changed to expect
filenames in this encoding, and the common POSIX functions dealing
- with pathnames have been wrapped. On Windows these wrappers use the
- wide-character API to do the actual file handling, so applications
- can handle file names containing any Unicode characters, not just
- those in the system codepage. (Wide character API is not available
- on Win9x.)
+ with pathnames have been wrapped. These wrappers are declared in the
+ header <glib/gstdio.h> which must be included explicitly; it is not
+ included through <glib.h>.
+
+ On current (NT-based) Windows versions, where the on-disk file names
+ are Unicode, these wrappers use the wide-character API in the C
+ library. Thus applications can handle file names containing any
+ Unicode characters through GLib's own API and its POSIX wrappers,
+ not just file names restricted to characters in the system codepage.
To keep binary compatibility with applications compiled against
older versions of GLib, the Windows DLL still provides entry points
with the old semantics using the old names, and applications
- compiled agains GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
+ compiled against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
-* Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed to return
- UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for applications compiled
- against older versions of GLib.
+ When compiling against GLib 2.6, applications intended to be
+ portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
+ consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
+ names have been constructed from strings returned from GLib.
+
+* Likewise, g_get_user_name() and g_get_real_name() have been changed
+ to return UTF-8 on Windows, while keeping the old semantics for
+ applications compiled against older versions of GLib.
* The GLib uses an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
- must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
- with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
- In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
- GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
+ must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
+ with prefixes such as _g will be exported from the library, on others not.
+ In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that,
+ GLib+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed
header files and were never intended to be exported.
-* GLib uses a technique involving macros for reducing the amount of PLT
- redirections which has the side effect that the names of internally used
- GLib functions are prefixed with IA__. The g_return_if_fail() macros
- strip this prefix away, but it will show up e.g. in a debugger.
+* To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GLib, when compiled
+ with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
+ points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
+ IA__, may be seen when debugging a GLib program.
* On Windows, GLib no longer opens a console window when printing
warning messages if stdout or stderr are invalid, as they are in
stderr if you need to see them.
* The child watch functionality tends to reveal a bug in many
- thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads implementation
- on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid() for a child
- created in a different thread. For this reason, for maximum portability,
- you should structure your code to fork all child processes that you want
- to wait for from the main thread.
-
-* A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
- it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
- connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
- for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
+ thread implementations (in particular the older LinuxThreads
+ implementation on Linux) where it's not possible to call waitpid()
+ for a child created in a different thread. For this reason, for
+ maximum portability, you should structure your code to fork all
+ child processes that you want to wait for from the main thread.
+
+* A problem was recently discovered with g_signal_connect_object();
+ it doesn't actually disconnect the signal handler once the object being
+ connected to dies, just disables it. See the API docs for the function
+ for further details and the correct workaround that will continue to
work with future versions of GLib.
How to report bugs
==================
-Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
+Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product glib.) You will need
to create an account for yourself.
And anything else you think is relevant.
-* How to reproduce the bug.
+* How to reproduce the bug.
- If you can reproduce it with the testgtk program that is built
- in the gtk/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
- please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
- As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
+ If you can reproduce it with one of the test programs that are built
+ in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise,
+ please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior.
+ As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece
of software that can be downloaded.
* If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out
and attach the patch to that bug report.
Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword
-in their keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GLib
+in their keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GLib
programming interface, the API keyword should also be included.
Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU
projects / platform / upstream / glib.git / blobdiff