GLib 2.6.0 released

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

GLib 2.6.0 is now available for download at:

 ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/

glib-2.6.0.tar.bz2   md5sum: 649b89c8bfd152feea6db6f68b7cd54e
glib-2.6.0.tar.gz    md5sum: 3138af4f8ea6a1fcf03a502c405e5c52

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.


GLib 2.6 is a stable release adding an incremental improvement
in functionality over GLib 2.4 while maintaining binary and
source compatibility. New features include:

Major new APIs
* GOption, a command-line option parser
* GKeyFile, a parser/editor for files with .INI-style syntax 
* Functions to support the XDG basedir specification
* Wrappers for common POSIX pathname functions to handle filename
  encodings consistently. On Windows, these use UTF-8.

Performance improvements
* Optimize g_utf8_validate()
* Optimize g_markup_parse_context_parse()
* Reduce signal connection complexity from O(n) to O(1) 
* Get rid of many PLT entries for internally used exported symbols
* Reduce code size by removing literal strings from g_return_if_fail()

Miscellaneous new functions
* g_filename_display_name() converts filenames in displayable UTF-8
strings
* g_uri_list_extract_uris() splits uri lists
* g_date_get_iso8601_week_of_year() gets ISO 8601 week numbers
* g_log_set_default_handler() installs an alternate default log handler
* g_get_language_names() obtains a list of applicable locale names
* g_strv_length() calculates the length of NULL-terminated string arrays
* g_win32_get_windows_version() determines the Windows version 
* G_GNUC_INTERNAL marks functions as non-exported
* glib_check_version() checks the GLib version at runtime
* g_debug() completes the family of logging functions

Other changes
* On Windows, GLib functions that take file name arguments now require
  those to be in UTF-8 and functions that return file names return
UTF-8.
* Use higher precision for mathematical constants
* Don't convert to/from UTF-8 in g_filename_to_uri/g_filename_from_uri
* Support ll as a printf format modifier for long long on all platforms
* Add stricter checking on exported ABI 
* Add a .pc file for using gmodule in libraries
* Require ngettext


More information about GLib is available at:

 http://www.gtk.org/


The GLib 2.6 Team:

 Hans Breuer, Matthias Clasen, Tim Janik, Tor Lillqvist, 
 Manish Singh, Owen Taylor, and Sebastian Wilhelmi

Special thanks to:

 Anders Carlsson [GOption]
 Ray Strode [GKeyFile, XDG basedir support]
 Arjan van de Ven [PLT reduction]

Thanks to all the GLib 2.6 contributors, including:

 Adam Hooper, Alex Larsson, Andrea Campi, Archana Shah, Beno� Carpentier, Bruce Hochstetler, Christian Persch, Christophe Fergeau,
 Crispin Flowerday, Danek Duvall, Danilo Segan, Darin Adler, David
 MacLachlan,, Ed Griffiths, Federico Mena Quintero, Frederic Crozat,
 Glynn Foster, Gustavo Carneiro, Havoc Pennington, Hidetaka Iwai,
 Hidetoshi Tajima, Hiroyuki Ikezoe, Ivan Wong, J. Ali Harlow, James
 Henstridge, Jody Goldberg, John Ehresman, Jonas Jonnson, Jon-Kare
 Hellan, Julio M. Merino Vidal, Kaz Sasayama, Kazuki IWAMOTO, Kjartan
 Maraas, Linus Walleij, Lucas Rocha, Mariano Su�z-Alvarez, Mark
 McLoughlin, Masatake YAMATO, Mats-Ola Persson, Michael Natterer,
 Morten Welinder, Murray Cumming, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, Niklas Lundell,
 Nikolai Weibull, Oliver Guntermann, Peter Zelezny, Philippe Blain,
 Robert �ren, Sebastian Wilhelmi, S�Sandmann, Stepan Kasal, Sven
 Herzberg, Sven Neumann, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Tim-Philipp M� Tommi
 Komulainen, Vincent Noe


16 December, 2004