Merging gio into glib

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

At the gtk team irc meeting yesterday, there was a broad consensus
that the merge plan as laid out earlier by Alex on this list (ie
merging gio into the glib vcs and tarball, but keep it in a separate
shared library) makes sense and that we should proceed with this as
soon as gio is "ready".

Yesterday I said I'd hope for gio to be ready before Christmas, but in
talking with Alex today he expressed that gio is in pretty good shape
right now, and therefore, we tentatively agreed to start merging it
next week. This will allow us to produce a GLib devel snapshot early
in December and keeps us  on track for having a gio-containing GLib
release for Gnome 2.22.

One issue that has still not been finalized is what name to pick for
the new shared library. One option is to just leave it as libgio,
since that is what it will contain initially. But on the other hand,
the eventual goal for this library is to contain other gobject-based
apis that deserve to live on the GLib level such as GSettings.
Therefore, a more generic name like libgsystem or libgbase might be
better. My personal view is that keeping the libgio name is fine;  if
other things later land, we can easily have pkg-config files that make
it more obvious, e.g. gio.pc and gsettings.pc that both contain -lgio.

gvfs will remain a separate module hosting the various backends. This
would be a useful area for people to contribute, since gvfs currently
lacks quite a few of the backends that gnome-vfs has. I know that Dan
Winship and Christian Kellner are working on a libsoup-based http
backend, and somebody else started an ftp backend, but help in this
area would be greatly appreciated.

Comments ?


Matthias