api review, changes to glib

[Andy Wingo]

Hello hackers!

As you might be aware, the only thing between guile-gnome and stability
has been a comprehensive API review. Well, I've gone ahead and done
one -- that is, ran a script across all of the documentation to just
print out the definitions without docs, printed them 4-up to a page, and
then spent some hours in a cafe looking to see if the interfaces make
sense.

The goal is that for the next release, to have only interfaces that can
be stable for perpetuity. That's pretty easy on the upstream side -- the
libraries that are part of the Gnome platform are stable. For us it's a
question of sensibly mapping the C calling conventions to Scheme. For
example, in Scheme, if a procedure takes a string, it normally should
not take an extra argument saying how long the string is. Things like
that. Also, we have to be careful with functions that introduce memory
management issues, such as strchr.

With that in mind, I just committed a number of cleanups to the GLib
module. Thanks to our nifty apicheck regression suite, we know exactly
what these (incompatible) changes are. Check it out:

  
http://codebrowse.launchpad.net/~andywingo/guile-gnome/glib/revision?start_revid=wingo%40pobox.com-20071123191954-py55ud04bqot8las#test-suite/wrapset.api-s

Please excuse the terrible URL. Also excuse the terrible page -- it's a
side-by-side diff, and you will probably have to scroll to see the right
side. It's mostly deletions anyway.

I'm going to move through the other modules in the coming two or three
weeks, make a testing release or two, and then we can call ourselves
2.16.0. Yay!

Anyways, that's the status.

Peace,

Andy
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