[ANNOUNCE] PyGObject 2.28.0 - stable

[John Palmieri <johnp redhat com>]

I am pleased to announce version 2.28.0 of the Python bindings for GObject.  

Including the stable improvements in the base pygobject modules this is the first stable release of the Introspection binding.  PyGObject Introspection is compatible with both the Python 2 and Python 3 runtimes.

This marks the second major development project I have had the pleasure to help bring to fruition.  Like for D-Bus, I am merely the public face of a rather vibrant development community.  While I hope I don't leave anyone out I would like to thank the following people who dedicated their valuable time to the future of the Python platform for GNOME.

• Johan Dahlin - creator of PyBank, the predecessor to PyGObject Introspection, for giving us direction, advice and helping to review patches
• Tomeu Vizoso - co-maintainer, my good friend, the reason why we decided to push for Introspection support and probably the hardest worker on our team
• Steve Frécinaux - for all of his leak hunting and bug fixing while testing against libpeas and gedit plugins
• Ignacio Casal Quinterio - for fixing bugs while porting the gedit plugins to the new bindings
• Laszlo Pandy - for fixing some of the tougher bugs and winning the "why are you awake at this hour, hacking on PyGObject while on irc?" award
• Martin Pitti - who worked on GVarients and making GDBus easy to use from PyGObject
• Simon van der Linden - who started this journey with us and has been helping us along when he finds the time
• Simon Schampijer - our newcomer from OLPC/Sugar development who jumped right in to help at the hackfest• 
• Sebastian Pölsterl - another hackfest alum who ported GNOME DVB Daemon's GUI
• John Ehresman - creator of the initial Python 3 support code
• Dave Malcolm - some of the initial Python 3 bits and my sounding board for any Python issues I ran into
• The entire GObject Introspection team - especially the tireless Colin Walters who fixed our many GI bugs quickly while also putting up with my complaining both at work and whenever we happened to grab a beer in one of the local watering holes
• The Python team - for making an excellent language for us to bind to

The new release is available from ftp.gnome.org:

       http://download.gnome.org/sources/pygobject/2.28/

What's new since PyGObject 2.27.92?

• fix sinking of floating objects
• fix leaks when setting properties
• add basic icon view demo
• add search entry demo
• override Gdk.RGBA so you can construct it like Gdk.RGBA(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
• handle unichar gvalues in TreeModels
• check for _thread module when configuring threading
• package config file now contains overridesdir variable for 3rd party overrides
• on windows set bdist_wininst user-access-control property when installing
• Gtk.stock_lookup return None on failure instead of a success value
• Python 2.5 fixes
• Python 3 fixes

Blurb:

GObject is a object system library used by GTK+ and GStreamer.

PyGObject provides a convenient wrapper for the GObject library for use in Python programs, and takes care of many of the boring details such as managing memory and type casting.  When combined with PyGTK, PyORBit and gnome-python, it can be used to write full featured Gnome applications.

Like the GObject library itself PyGObject is licensed under the GNU LGPL, so is suitable for use in both free software and proprietary applications. It is already in use in many applications ranging from small single purpose scripts up to large full featured applications.

PyGObject requires glib >= 2.22.4 and Python >= 2.5.1 to build.
GIO bindings require glib >= 2.22.4.

The Introspection module is the next generation Python GObject library bindings. Instead of statically wrapping every GObject based library we can now dynamically accesses any of those libraries using GObject Introspection. It replaces the need for separate modules such as PyGTK, GIO and python-gnome to build a full GNOME 3.0 application. Once new functionality is added to gobject library it is instantly available as a Python API without the need for an intermediate Python module.

Introspection/Python 2 bindings requires gobject-introspection >= 0.9.5 and pycairo >=1.0.2 or py2cairo >=1.8.10
Introspection/Python 3 bindings requires gobject-introspection >= 0.9.5, pycairo >=1.8.10 and Python >= 3.1
 
--
John (J5) Palmieri
GNOME Foundation member
johnp redhat com