- *** IMPORTANT ***
-
-This is a development version of GLib. You should be using a stable
-version, which is available at ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v1.2/. This
-version is meant for developers of GLib only:
-
- * You should not base stable software on this version of GLib.
- * GNOME developers should use a stable version of GLib.
-
-*** You should be using GLib 1.2 instead. ***
-
-
General Information
===================
-This is GLib version @GLIB_VERSION@. GLib is a library which includes support
-routines for C such as lists, trees, hashes, memory allocation, and
-many other things.
+This is GLib version @GLIB_VERSION@. GLib is the low-level core
+library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME. It
+provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and
+interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads,
+dynamic loading, and an object system.
The official ftp site is:
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk
See the file 'INSTALL'
+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
+======================
+
+* GLib 2.6 introduces the concept of 'GLib filename encoding', which is the
+ 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. 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 against GLib 2.6 will actually use new names for the
+ functions. This is transparent to the programmer.
+
+ 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
+ header files and were never intended to be exported.
+
+* 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
+ "Windows subsystem" (GUI) applications. Simply redirect stdout or
+ 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
+ work with future versions of GLib.
+
How to report bugs
==================
* 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,
+ 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.
projects / platform / upstream / glib.git / blobdiff