GNet README
-----------

GNet is a simple network library.  It is written in C,
object-oriented, and built upon GLib.  It is intended to be easy to
use and port.  GNet comes with documentation and examples.  It is
licensed under the GNU Library General Public Licence.

Features:
  * TCP "client" and "server" sockets
  * UDP and IP Multicast sockets
  * High-level TCP connection and server objects
  * Asynchronous socket IO
  * Internet address abstraction
  * Asynchronous DNS lookup
  * IPv4 and IPv6 support
  * Byte packing and unpacking
  * URI parsing
  * SHA and MD5 hashes
  * Base64 encoding and decoding
  * SOCKS support
  * High-level HTTP connection object

GNet has been ported to Linux, *BSD, MacOSX, Solaris, HP, MacOS X, and
Windows.  It may work on other operating systems also.

GNet requires GLib 2.x, available at www.gtk.org.  Or, if
you have a system with packages (e.g., Red Hat or Debian), look for
the latest glib package (glib2-devel or libglib2.0-dev usually).

Comments and questions should be sent to gnet@gnetlibrary.org.

The GNet homepage is at <http://www.gnetlibrary.org>.


Install
=======

In a nutshell:
  > ./configure
  > make
  > make install

If gethostbyname() and gethostbyaddr() are thread-safe, pass the
--enable-threadsafe-gethostbyname() to configure.  (If it is and you
don't do this, it will still function correctly.)

Similarly, if getaddrinfo() and getnameinfo() are thread-safe, pass
the --enable-threadsafe-getaddrinfo() to configure

The flag --with-html-dir=DIR controls the directory the HTML
documentation goes into.  By default it will go into
DATADIR/doc/libgnet-X.Y, which DATADIR is /usr/local/share on most
Unix machines.  Use this flag if you want it to go somewhere else.


INSTALL is the standard autoconf INSTALL file.


Bugs
====

Bug reports should be submitted through <http://bugzilla.gnome.org>.
Our bug page is:
   <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gnet>

See BUGS for known bugs.


Mailing lists
=============

Go to <http://www.gnetlibrary.org/mailman/listinfo/> to join the
mailing lists and view the archives.

Name			Purpose
gnet-announce		Announcements about GNet
gnet-discuss		Discussion of GNet for users and programmers
gnet-dev		Discussion of GNet for the developers of GNet



Developer info
==============

API documentation lives on the GNet homepage (specifically, at
<http://www.gnetlibrary.org/docs>)

NOTE ON EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES.  The URL, Server, and Conn modules are
experimental and part of the IOChannel module is also experimental.
The GNet development team believes these modules are useful and
usable, but are not yet completely confident in them.  The API to
these modules may change and there may still be bugs in them.  For
example, the URL module is incomplete and the new IOChannel functions
should be audited again.  If you are feeling adventurous and want to
use these functions, define GNET_EXPERIMENTAL.  Otherwise, your
compiler should warn or fail if they are used.  We welcome bug fixes,
improvements, and comments on the experimental modules.  Our hope is
that adventurous programmers will use these modules and help in their
further development.

The Nylon SOCKS server is required for SOCKS server socket support.
SOCKS server sockets are weird.  Marius, a Nylon and GNet developer,
changed the semantics in Nylon to make SOCKS integration in GNet
easier/possible.  GNet SOCKS clients should work with any SOCKS
server.  The Nylon homepage is
<http://mesh.eecs.umich.edu/projects/nylon/>.


Hacking
=======

If you are interested in contributing to GNet, please see 'HACKING'.
This includes information on how to get GNet from the repository and
how to submit patches.


License
=======

Read COPYING for information on the license.  GNet is under the GNU
Lesser General Public License.


Applications that use GNet
==========================

eDonkey2000 GTK frontend
  eDonkey2000 (DFS) frontend
  http://ed2k-gtk-gui.sourceforge.net

Gnome Chinese Checkers
  board game
  http://gchch.sourceforge.net/

Gnome Jabber
  instant messaging and chat
  http://gnome-jabber.sourceforge.net

Jungle Monkey
  distributed file sharing program
  http://www.junglemonkey.net

Mail Notify
  mail notification applet
  http://www.nongnu.org/mailnotify/

MSI
  multi-simulation interface
  http://msi.sourceforge.net>

PAN
  Gnome newsreader
  http://pan.rebelbase.com

PreViking
  telephony middleware
  http://www.bellworldwide.net/previking/

Sussen
  network scanner
  http://sussen.sourceforge.net/

Workrave
  rest break reminder
  http://www.workrave.org/

To compile GNet on MacOS X (and NeXT, OpenStep and other similar OS's)
you need to disable smart preprocessing.  To do this, instead of just
running configure run:

csh/tcsh:
  % setenv CFLAGS -traditional-cpp
  % ./configure

sh/bash:
  % CFLAGS=-traditional-cpp ./configure

(This may not be required in 10.1 and later version.)

GNet README for Windows
-----------------------

This document contains:
 - General Windows Specific Information
 - Compiling GNet on Windows

General Windows Specific Information
----------------------------------

GNet 2.0 on Windows requires at least glib-2.2.3.
See: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html

For IPv6 support you need at least Windows XP SP1 or Windows 2003
(and both with the IPv6 stacks installed). GNet will automatically
detect at runtime, not compile time, if IPv6 is supported and set the
"IPv6 policy". Note that if IPv6 is installed, GNet will default to
use IPv6. Since Windows is a �dual stack� operating system this may
lead to your IPv4 only application to fail if the IPv6 stack is
installed since the bind() default is IPv6. You should explicitly
set the GNet "IPv6 policy� with
gnet_ipv6_set_policy(GIPV6_POLICY_IPV4_ONLY); after gnet_init();
if your application is IPv4 only.

I used Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows XP SP1 to test GNet 2.0.
I used Windows 98 and Windows NT 4 SP6a to test prior versions
of GNet however these versions of Windows have reached �end-of-life�
according to Microsoft. Theoretically all that is required is
Windows 95 (with the Winsock2 patch) or better, or Windows NT
(with Service Pack 4) or better.

On Windows if you do not have IPv6 installed then
gnet_inetaddr_list_interfaces() will return up to 10 interfaces.

Reminder that on windows, text files have extra "\r" in them where as
on UNIX they do not. This will throw off SHA & MD5 if you do not filter
the extra characters out before calling those functions.

Compiling GNet on Windows
-------------------------

Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2002, 2003 and Mingw/GCC should compile
GNet 2.0 without any issues. The few warnings that appear can be
ignored. Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 users will have to upgrade to
the latest Platform SDK. (Note that GNet is written in C, not C++.)

A mingw/gcc makefile is provided. Microsoft Visual C++ users
should look at and base their projects off this gcc makefile. A
.dsp file may be in this distribution but it is likely out of date.

You should compile GNet 2.0 on Windows with the -mno-cygwin,
-mms-bitfields and -DGNET_EXPERIMENTAL=1 options for gcc and
define GNET_EXPERIMENTAL when compiling with Microsoft Visual C++.
Note that the �Experimental� code such as the Conn API has now
stabilized on Windows.

Also note that -mno-cygwin means do not link to the cygwin
dll, link to MSVCRT when using cygwin tools. Linking to cygwin
is not supported.