Glib version 1.224 ================== This module provides perl access to Glib and GLib's GObject libraries. GLib is a portability and utility library; GObject provides a generic type system with inheritance and a powerful signal system. Together these libraries are used as the foundation for many of the libraries that make up the Gnome environment, and are used in many unrelated projects. This wrapper attempts to provide a perlish interface while remaining as true as possible to the underlying C API, so that any reference materials you can find on using GLib may still apply to using the libraries from perl. Where GLib's functionality overlaps perl's, perl's is favored; for example, you will find perl lists and arrays in place of GSList or GList objects. Some concepts have been eliminated; you need never worry about reference-counting on GObjects or GBoxed structures. Other concepts have been converted to a perlish analogy; the GType id will never be seen in perl, as the package name serves that purpose. See the main Glib manpage for more information. This module also provides facilities for creating wrappers for other GObject-based libraries. The documentation page of the gtk2-perl project's website has information about this stuff; see http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net/ INSTALLATION ------------ To install this module type the following: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install To avoid installing to a system directory, since this is a beta release, you can change the installation prefix at Makefile.PL time with perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/some/other/place This will install the module to the subdirectory lib/perl5 under the given prefix. If this is not already in perl's include path, you'll need to tell perl how to get to this library directory so you can use it; there are three ways: in your environment (the easiest): # assuming a bourne-style shell PERL5LIB=/some/other/place/lib/perl5/site_perl export PERL5LIB on the perl command line: perl -I /some/other/place/lib/perl5/site_perl yourscript in the code of your perl script: use lib '/some/other/place/lib/perl5/site_perl'; DEPENDENCIES ------------ In order to use perl bindings for glib, you must have glib 2.x and its prerequisites (pkg-config and a decent standard c library) installed. glib-2.x is available from http://www.gtk.org, http://www.gnome.org, etc. Glib uses unicode internally; therefore this module requires perl 5.8.0 or newer. You'll also need the following modules in order to build the Glib module from source: ExtUtils::Depends >= 0.300 ExtUtils::PkgConfig >= 1.00 BUG REPORTS ----------- Please report bugs to the gnome-perl product in GNOME's Bugzilla: COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE --------------------- Copyright (C) 2003-2008 by the gtk2-perl team (see the file AUTHORS for the full list) This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA. # $Id$