glib/README

General Information
===================

This is GLib version 2.17.2. 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/glib

The official web site is:
  http://www.gtk.org/

Information about mailing lists can be found at
  http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html

To subscribe: mail -s subscribe gtk-list-request@gnome.org < /dev/null
(Send mail to gtk-list-request@gnome.org with the subject "subscribe")

Installation
============

See the file 'INSTALL'

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
======================

* 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
==================

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.

In the bug report please include:

* Information about your system. For instance:

   - What operating system and version
   - For Linux, what version of the C library

  And anything else you think is relevant.

* How to reproduce the bug. 

  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
  when the crash occured.

* Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but
  is not necessary.

Patches
=======

Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the
patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment
to that bug report.

Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch,
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 
programming interface, the API keyword should also be included.

Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU
diff.)