PyGObject 3.7.2 released

just released a new PyGObject, for GNOME 3.7.2 which is due on Wednesday.

In this version PyGObject went through some major refactoring: Some 5.000 lines of static bindings were removed and replaced with proper introspection and some overrides for backwards compatibility, and the static/GI/overrides code structure was simplified. For the developer this means that you can now use the full GLib API, a lot of which was previously hidden by old and incomplete static bindings; also you can and should now use the officially documented GLib API instead of PyGObject’s static one, which has been marked as deprecated. For PyGObject itself this change means that the code structure is now a lot simpler to understand, all the bugs in the static GLib bindings are gone, and the GLib bindings will not go out of sync any more.

Lots of new tests were written to ensure that the API is backwards compatible, but experience teaches that ther is always the odd corner case which we did not cover. So if your code does not work any more with 3.7.2, please do report bugs.

Another important change is that if you build pygobject from source, it now defaults to using Python 3 if installed. As before, you can build for Python 2 with PYTHON=python2.7 or the new --with-python=python2.7 configure option.

This release also brings several marshalling fixes, docstring improvements, support for code coverage, and other bug fixes.

Thanks to all contributors!

Summary of changes (see changelog for complete details):

  • [API change] Drop almost all static GLib bindings and replace them with proper introspection. This gets rid of several cases where the PyGObject API was not matching the real GLib API, makes the full GLib API available through introspection, and makes the code smaller, easier to maintain. For backwards compatibility, overrides are provided to emulate the old static binding API, but this will throw a PyGIDeprecationWarning for the cases that diverge from the official API (in particular, GLib.io_add_watch() and GLib.child_watch_add() being called without a priority argument). (Martin Pitt, Simon Feltman)
  • [API change] Deprecate calling GLib API through the GObject namespace. This has always been a misnomer with introspection, and will be removed in a later version; for now this throws a PyGIDeprecationWarning.
  • [API change] Do not bind gobject_get_data() and gobject_set_data(). These have been deprecated for a cycle, now dropped entirely. (Steve Frécinaux) (#641944)
  • [API change] Deprecate void pointer fields as general PyObject storage. (Simon Feltman) (#683599)
  • Add support for GVariant properties (Martin Pitt)
  • Add type checking to GVariant argument assignment (Martin Pitt)
  • Fix marshalling of arrays of struct pointers to Python (Carlos Garnacho) (#678620)
  • Fix Gdk.Atom to have a proper str() and repr() (Martin Pitt) (#678620)
  • Make sure g_value_set_boxed does not cause a buffer overrun with GStrvs (Simon Feltman) (#688232)
  • Fix leaks with GValues holding boxed and object types (Simon Feltman) (#688137)
  • Add doc strings showing method signatures for gi methods (Simon Feltman) (#681967)
  • Set Property instance doc string and blurb to getter doc string (Simon Feltman) (#688025)
  • Add GObject.G_MINSSIZE (Martin Pitt)
  • Fix marshalling of GByteArrays (Martin Pitt)
  • Fix marshalling of ssize_t to smaller ints (Martin Pitt)
  • Add support for lcov code coverage, and add a lot of missing GIMarshallingTests and g-i Regress tests. (Martin Pitt)
  • pygi-convert: remove deprecated GLib → GObject conversions (Jose Rostagno)
  • Add support for overriding GObject.Object (Simon Feltman) (#672727)
  • Add –with-python configure option (Martin Pitt)
  • Do not prefer unversioned “python” when configuring, as some distros have “python” as Python 3. Use Python 3 by default if available. Add –with-python configure option as an alternative to setting $PYTHON, whic is more discoverable. (Martin Pitt)
  • Fix property lookup in class hierarchy (Daniel Drake) (#686942)
  • Move property and signal creation into _class_init() (Martin Pitt) (#686149)
  • Fix duplicate symbols error on OSX (John Ralls)
  • [API add] Add get_introspection_module for getting un-overridden modules (Simon Feltman) (#686828)
  • Work around wrong 64 bit constants in GLib Gir (Martin Pitt) (#685022)
  • Mark GLib.Source.get_current_time() as deprecated (Martin Pitt)
  • Fix OverflowError in source_remove() (Martin Pitt) (#684526)