LibGTop 1.1.4 "Earthquake" (Developer's Snapshot) has been released

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

[This is intentionally not on gnome-announce-list and GNotices]

Hello,

LibGTop 1.1.4 "Earthquake" has been released.

This is a developer's snapshot and should not been used by end-users.
However, if you want to help with LibGTop's development or just help me to
find some bugs, feel free to try it out ....

I tested it on the following systems (the Solaris port is currently broken):

	Linux (kernel) 2.2.x
	NetBSD 1.3
	FreeBSD 3.3
	OpenBSD 2.6

This is the first release after a longer development periode, so a lot of
things have changed and this whole thing can be a bit unstable at the moment.

                                   * * *

You can get it from

   ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/libgtop/libgtop-1.1.4.tar.gz
   ftp://ftp.home-of-linux.org/pub/libgtop/1.1/libgtop-1.1.4.tar.gz

There are also some (experimental) Debian packages available at:

   ftp://ftp.home-of-linux.org/pub/libgtop/devel/

                                   * * *

This release covers most things we discussed on libgtop-devel-list some time
ago (new network info, _as_array functions etc.).

Summary of most important changes since 1.1.2:

* We have a new "backend" interface: LibGTop now supports so-called "backends";
  whenever you call any of the `glibtop_get_<feature>_l' library functions, it
  forwards it to the appropriate backend which will then return the data.

  The old `libgtop-daemon' which was used for remote communications is gone.
  This can easily be done with the new backend API outside the main LibGTop
  source tree; you just need to write a "glibtop_backend_daemon" backend for
  it. This can for instance be done using CORBA ....

* Improved error reporting: all library functions now have an `int' return
  value (except those which already return different things such as lists,
  of cause) which is 0 on success and less than 0 on error.

  The `glibtop' structure has an `glibtop_errno' field which will hold an
  error constant from <glibtop/errors.h>.

* Improved handling of array and lists; we have a new `glibtop_array' type
  and all functions which return an array now take a `glibtop_array' in
  addition to the `glibtop_<feature>' (except where this'd result in an
  empty `glibtop_<feature>' type, where they only take the `glibtop_array' one).

  This helps a lot for scripting languages which encode array lengths and such
  in their arrays; they don't need this parameter any longer.

* `_as_array' convenient functions.

  All functions return arrays and lists now have a `_as_array' convenient
  function which returns a GLib Array.

I'm planning to do a 1.1.5 release in 2-3 weeks which will contain updated
documentation and a new version of the LibGTop reference manual.

This release is also a "request for comments" - if you have any comments or
suggestions about the new API, please let me know.

Now is also the time to come with wishlist things and feature request for
LibGTop 1.2 ....

-- 
Martin Baulig - martin@home-of-linux.org - http://www.home-of-linux.org