[Haskell] Gtk2Hs version 0.11.0 released

[Axel Simon]

Dear all,

the Gtk2Hs team is very happy to announce the release of version  
0.11.0, the first release that comes in Cabal packages!

Gtk2Hs is a collection of wrappers around the Gtk+ graphical user  
interface suite. However, it is more than just user interfaces! Using  
a subset of packages, you can also render high quality graphics and  
text to PDF, PS, PNG and SVG documents.

Gtk2Hs consists of code that is partly generated but always adjusted  
by hand afterwards, especially the documentation. One of our aims it  
to make the Haskell interface self-contained and Haskell-lish. For  
example, memory management is fully automatic (of course!) and the  
store of widgets displaying tables or lists is a Haskell data  
structure. We have invested a great deal to make Gtk2Hs work in multi- 
threaded programs which was challenging given the concurrent garbage  
collector of GHC. Due to this effort, Gtk2Hs works from within GHCi  
and, of course, it works on Windows.

This release has been tested on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (XP/7). It  
can be built with GHC 6.10 and 6.12 and Cabal 1.6 and 1.8. However,  
since it's our first Cabal release, there might be rough edges, so any  
feedback is appreciated.

The use of Cabal means that Gtk2Hs is now split into the following  
packages:

• gtk2hs-buildtools: build tools, required to build from source
• glib: object type system and data structures
• gio: an OS-agnostic file access API
• cairo: a 2D vector graphics library
• pango: a Unicode-aware font rendering engine
• gtk: the base GUI library
• gconf: configuration database
• glade: a library to build user interfaces from XML descriptions
• gnomevfs: an OS-agnostic file access API (deprecated)
• gstreamer: a multimedia streaming framework
• gtkglext: an OpenGL widget
• gtksourceview2: a source-code widget
• soegtk: an API providing functions for Paul Hudak’s Haskell School  
of Expressions book
• svgcairo: writing Cairo graphics to SVG files
• vte: a terminal widget
• webkit: a web-browser widget, based on Apple’s webkit library

The aim is to concentrate future development on the core packages  
(i.e. the first six packages from the list above) and encourage  
external contributions to the remaining packages by putting them into  
their own repositories and granting write access to people. Through  
this process we hope to encourage external contributions and to  
accelerate the development of the core libraries.

To install from sources, see:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/download/

Documentation can be found here:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/documentation/

Many thanks to all the external contributors that helped us prepare  
the release!

Happy GUIing,
Axel (on behalf of the Gtk2Hs team)