[Vala] Behaviour of assigning object obtained via property (unowned) to strong reference

[James Moschou <james moschou gmail com>]

Hi

I'm having trouble debugging my application, I'm getting references suddenly
becoming null, and I'm finding the existing explanations surrounding memory
management in vala confusing.

The explanation at http://live.gnome.org/Vala/ReferenceHandling has got:
> Vala prevents you from assigning an unowned reference to a strong (i.e.
not unowned) reference. However, you can transfer the ownership to another
reference with (owned)

But then the tutorial at http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Tutorial has got:
> If the calling code is written as
> Object o = get_unowned_ref();
> Vala will try to either obtain a reference of or a duplicate of the
instance the unowned reference pointing to

Since I'm not getting compiling errors or warnings I assume that the latter
is what's happening, but I still don't know exactly what's happening. Is it
making a copy, increasing the ref count by 1 or transferring ownership?