Fixes a lot of issues found by a code review done by Barry Warsaw.

Those include:
 - Wrong signature for getters
 - Various memory leaks
 - Various optimizations
 - More consistent return values
 - Proper exception handling
Signed-off-by: Stéphane Graber <stgraber@ubuntu.com>
Reported-by: Barry Warsaw <barry@ubuntu.com>
Acked-by: Barry Warsaw <barry@ubuntu.com>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>