libglnx is the successor to libgsystem: https://git.gnome.org/browse/libgsystem
It is for modules which depend on both GLib and Linux, intended to be used as a git submodule.
Features:
- File APIs which use
openat()
like APIs, but also take aGCancellable
to support dynamic cancellation - APIs also have a
GError
parameter - High level "shutil", somewhat inspired by Python's
- A "console" API for tty output
- A backport of the GLib cleanup macros for projects which can't yet take a dependency on 2.40.
Why?
There are multiple projects which have a hard dependency on Linux and GLib, such as NetworkManager, ostree, flatpak, etc. It makes sense for them to be able to share Linux-specific APIs.
This module also contains some code taken from systemd, which has very high quality LGPLv2+ shared library code, but most of the internal shared library is private, and not namespaced.
One could also compare this project to gnulib; the salient differences there are that at least some of this module is eventually destined for inclusion in GLib.
Porting from libgsystem
For all of the filesystem access code, libglnx exposes only
fd-relative API, not GFile*
. It does use GCancellable
where
applicable.
For local allocation macros, you should start using the g_auto
macros from GLib. A backport is included in libglnx. There are a few
APIs not defined in GLib yet, such as glnx_autofd
.
gs_transfer_out_value
is replaced by g_steal_pointer
.
Contributing
Development happens in GNOME Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx
(If you're seeing this on the Github mirror, we used to do development on Github but that was before GNOME deployed Gitlab.)