ANNOUNCE: SLgtk 0.5.1

[Michael Noble <mnoble space mit edu>]

Announcement
============

Versions 0.5.1 of SLgtk and 0.9.7 of SLIRP are now available at

          http://space.mit.edu/~mnoble/slgtk

Highlights of this release include:

	- Almost 150 additional Gtk functions, supporting several new
	  widgets/objects (GtkListStore, GtkTreeview, GtkCellRenderer, etc)
	- Support for defining ancestry/class hierarchies within the
	  bundled SLIRP code generator
	- Several updates to the VWhere guilet
	- New and improved documentation and sample guilets
	- Faster builds

Description
===========

The SLgtk package binds the Gtk2 and GtkExtra widget sets to the S-Lang
scripting language (www.s-lang.org).  SLgtk wraps almost 2200 functions
from Gtk2 and its constituent libraries, includes over 4000 lines of
sample code in 40+ working guilets, and provides a code generator (SLIRP)
which can be useful for building additional S-Lang modules.

SLgtk also includes a visual version of the powerful S-Lang "where"
command, extensions to and performance enhancements for several GtkExtra
widgets, and a pixbuf loader for the FITS image file format widely used
within astronomy.

Regards,

-Michael S. Noble

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Changes in v0.5.1:

1.  SLIRP 0.9.7 enhancements:
	- extended type ancestry support: an opaque type may now have a
	  hierarchy of ancestors, instead of just one.
2.  Use new SLIRP ancestry support to encode knowledge of most the Gtk class
    hierarchy within SLgtk.  Among other things, it is now possible to:
	- use g_signal routines on any GObject instance, not just GtkWidget
	- ditto for g_object set/get q/data routines on any GObject instance
	- catch many more type mismatch problems at the S-Lang layer, instead
	  of allowing them to cascade down into the C layer of Gtk proper
3.  Wrapped gtk_container_foreach()
4.  Created gtk_widget_get_allocation() to return (GtkWidget*)->allocation
    field.  Added a use case to examples/drawarea.sl sample code.
5.  Added nominal support for:
	- GtkItemFactory object
	- g_quark_* family of functions.
	- g_param_spec_* family of functions
	- GtkTextChildAnchor object
	- GtkCellRender object (and children)
	- GtkListStore object (and sample code at examples/liststore.sl)
	- GtkTreeView widget using a GtkListStore model
6.  Wrap fundamental G_TYPE_* macros (gtype.h) as S-Lang ulong constants.
7.  Wrap G_TYPE_PARAM_* macros (gparamspec.h) as S-Lang ulong constants.
8.  Attempting to create a text tag from an unbalanced name/value property
    list now signals error, instead of creating the tag with zero properties.
9.  gtk_text_buffer_get_iter_* routines now return the GtkTextIter result on
    the stack, instead of using a reference parameter (as in C api).  This is
    the more natural S-Lang usage, and requires less code than in C.
10. VWhere 1.0.7 enhancements:
	- improved zooming and panning
	- added preference to customize default plot line/connector style
11. Simplified build process and improved performance.