This blog post is an extract of the release note from the NEWS file which you can read online … or in the sources, of course!

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java-gnome 4.0.11 (1 May 2009)

This is a bug fix release.

We made a few mistakes in our handling of the PangoAttribute structures’ memory which resulted in VM crashes [unfortunately, the normal GNOME way of debugging things is to SIGSEGV. That's fine for a C program but Bad™ for your average Java Virtual Machine as it takes out the entire process. We therefore work rather hard to avoid -- or at least trap -- this sort of thing]. Releasing corrections for these bugs was a priority.

Concurrently a significant internal improvement in our handling of accumulating Attributes into AttributeLists was made. While this is not user visible per se, we were able to drop the requirement that the text you were formatting already be in the Pango Layout before assigning the range that the Attribute would cover. You also no longer need to pass that Layout to setIndices() when building up Attributes. This makes things a great deal easier if you are simultaneously aggregating the text and assigning markup.

Martin Garton contributed some documentation quality improvements and new coverage. Serkan Kaba made some minor fixes to ensure the unit tests run in a Turkish locale. And as ever there are small incremental improvements to various classes, including a number of additional properties exposed care of the work of new contributor Thijs Leibbrand.

Looking ahead

This was a brief cycle; as noted we’re mostly pushing some bug fixes. Meanwhile there are a number of significant branches underway by various hackers; which, hopefully, will feature prominently in the next release.

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You can download java-gnome from ftp.gnome.org or easily checkout a branch from ‘mainline‘ using Bazaar:

$ bzr checkout bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome

though if you’re going to do that you’d best follow the HACKING guidelines.

AfC