I’ve been promising a release of GtkUnique for a while now, but work and other stuff got in the way of the namespace change-slash-rewrite. Yesterday I finally got around finishing the porting of the Unix domain sockets backend (or “bacon”) so I cooked up a preliminary release with the D-Bus and Bacon backends working. You can find the tarball here or, if you’re feeling in hacking mood, you can check out the git repository from here:
git clone http://www.gnome.org/~ebassi/git/unique.git
the unique-0.9.1 is the tag for this release. I’ll work on finishing the port of the Xlibs backend and target a stable 1.0.0 release for GUADEC.
The API of Unique changed a bit since the last GtkUnique release, and I think it’ll change a bit more in order to be usable with the smallest impact possible. Now you can register custom commands and there’s convenience API for sending strings and URI lists; the command registration and construction API might change to something similar to the GtkDialog API - and I might switch to a more signal based approach (construct the message payload inside a signal handler) before 1.0. I also might add a —replace command line switch that gets slurped and does The Right Thing for you.
The biggest change is happening under the hood, though; with this release, the UniqueApp instance will request the specified name as soon as it is created, so you’ll be guaranteed to either be the first running instance or be able to send messages to the currently running instance at the same moment that the UniqueApp constructor returns. Hence, no more race conditions between the constructor and the “is running” request. Finally, the “window watching” functions have been removed - even though I might add a “watch window” function to handle the startup notification sequence for you (now that we have the API to do that in GTK+ 2.11).
This release also means that the code in SVN under the gtkunique module is to be considered deprecated. I’m going to ask the svnmaster to move it into the attic, as the delta is too big for a simple check-in. As soon as 1.0.0 is out I’ll also ask the release-team for “blessing” Unique as a dependency, so if you want your module to depend on it you’ll be able to safely do it. Again, sorry for taking this long to finish up this work.
Update@2007-07-09T15:16+0100: I’ve just rolled a 0.9.1 to fix some build issues and add licensing terms. Thanks to Christian Persch for the heads up.