Gtk2Hs 0.9.11 RC2 available for testing

[Duncan Coutts]

The second release candidate for Gtk2Hs 0.9.11 is now available.
(The actual version number is 0.9.10.6)

The source tarball and windows installer are available:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.10.6.tar.gz
(md5sum 8842898cb1f6b595b5a3a057e66a810b)

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.10.6.exe
(md5sum 97ed838d88ee2d6a01e78d3fea26c18c)

and the corresponding documentation:
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/docs/gtk2hs-docs-0.9.10.6/


Changes since 0.9.10: 
      * works with GHC-6.6 and Gtk+ 2.10.x 
      * new typed tree/list widget API 
      * new OpenGL widget added 
      * new cairo SVG package (for rendering SVG images on cairo
        surfaces) 
      * new implementation of the Graphics.SOE API 
      * new glade tutorial (and hopefully the new intro tutorial will be
        ready in time too) 
      * many more demo programs (clock, graph, traffic congestion sim,
        fonts, noughts & crosses, opengl, svg and updated profile viewer
        and other tree/list demos) 
      * much smaller binaries (thanks to the ghc 'split objs' feature) 
      * many bugs fixed 
      * various minor documentation improvements

Changes since the first release candidate: 
      * now works again in GHCi (even in Windows!)
      * new functions for working with the threaded RTS 
      * new ./configure --enable-profiling flag 
      * new ./configure --with-user-pkgconf flag 
      * Windows version now uses the "MS Windows" theme by default 
      * Windows version now comes with the Gtk+ OpenGL package 
      * Windows version now supports GHCi (6.6 only) and profiling
      * minor fixes to various demo programs 
      * the svgcairo package now uses librsvg rather than libsvg-cairo

Please test this on your platform and report success or failures to the
gtk2hs users list (gtk2hs-users at lists.sourceforge.net). So far we've
tested on Linux (x86, x86-64, sparc), Windows and Solaris (sparc) with
GHC 6.2.2, 6.4.1, 6.4.2, 6.6 and with Gtk+ 2.0 and 2.10. Build reports
from people using *BSD, Mac OS X (ppc or x86), GHC 6.0.x or Gtk+ 2.4-2.8
would be particularly appreciated.


Windows notes:
The installer expects GHC 6.4.2 or 6.6. (As always if you need a build
for a different version of GHC then that's possible by building from
source.) The GHCi support is only for GHC-6.6 (due to the infamous
relocs overflow bug in earlier versions).

The installer now comes bundled with Gtk+ itself so there's no need to
download it separately. Hopefully this should also make the installation
process a bit more reliable if only by reducing the number of
configuration combinations.

The windows build doesn't include the svgcairo or sourceview packages
since they introduce rather a large number of dependencies and would
make the installer a much bigger download.


Testing issues:
I have enabled the 'split-objs' feature by default (for linking the
Gtk2Hs libs such that the final binaries are much smaller). If you run
into problems during during the build that you think are related to
linking then try ./configure --disable-split-objs and report the problem
and whether turning off split-objs fixed it. Depending on how it goes
we'll decide whether to leave it on by default in the final release or
not.

For testing, try building, installing and then run:
make installcheck

This should build all the demo programs that are appropriate for your
configuration. Running a selection of them would be good and if you have
any other programs that use Gtk2Hs that you can test with, that'd be
great.


Packaging:
For people preparing packages for distributions: note that there are
three new packages, "gtkglext", "svgcairo" and "soegtk". For reference
there is a Gentoo ebuild available:
http://haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/dev-haskell/gtk2hs/

The mozembed package can now be built against firefox, seamonkey,
xulrunner or mozilla. Just pass --enable-<thing> to ./configure.


Duncan
(on behalf of the Gtk2Hs team)