[Help-smalltalk] GNU Smalltalk 3.3 development opened

[Paolo Bonzini]

Hi all,

branches master and stable-3.2 are not anymore proceeding in parallel in 
my git repository.

In particular, the master branch already has the following changes:

- GLib/GObject bindings are now separate from the GTK bindings

- a new shared library is installed, libgst-gobject.so, containing the 
common functionality shared by the GLib and GTK bindings.  The ABI of 
this library will be stable, but only after 3.3 is released.

- GObject-Introspection bindings are included in the 
GObject-Introspection package.


Focus for 3.3 will be on improving bindings, possibly using the 
GObject-Introspection support (which may become mandatory before the 
release, depending on when/whether libgirepository gets into Fedora). 
This could be the code that Denis is working on or something completely 
different.  Time will tell!  It may or may not be backwards-compatible 
with the existing GTK bindings, though I hope search-and-replace will be 
enough to reconcile the differences.

Other possible changes will be:

- deprecating the <library> tag in the package description and replacing 
it with, well, something else;

- deprecating Namespace>>#current: to improve thread-safety of file-ins 
(suggested by Gwen);

- miscellaneous VisualGST improvements;

- other bindings, including the mythical GnuTLS support;

- support for non-Unix platforms, including the mythical support for 
Windows sockets and the also mythical MacOS X installer.

- inclusion of Seaside 3.0.x.

GNU Smalltalk 3.2.4 will be released later this month.

Paolo