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libglnx is the successor to 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 a GCancellable 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.

Adding this to your project

Meson

First, set up a Git submodule:

git submodule add https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx subprojects/libglnx

Or a Git subtree:

git remote add libglnx https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx.git
git fetch libglnx
git subtree add -P subprojects/libglnx libglnx/master

Then, in your top-level meson.build:

libglnx_dep = subproject('libglnx').get_variable('libglnx_dep')
# now use libglnx_dep in your dependencies

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.)