Re: Dependency Proposal: Clutter 0.6.2, ClutterMM 0.6

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 16:36 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For Gnome Games 2.24, I would like to have an optional
> hardware-accelerated Gnometris "theme". This would be enabled by
> default on installations where glxinfo reports "Direct Rendering:
> Yes". All of the old themes will continue to be present and used as
> "fall-backs" when the hardware is not there.
> 
> After much research, clutter appears to be the most Gnome-friendly,
> stable, and active canvas-like project. Others which may come up in
> this discussion are largely inactive (goocanvas) or sufficiently
> incomplete (hippocanvas) as to make them unusable for implementation
> of a Tetris-like game animation. pigment is out because it's
> Python-only (or so I am told). I'm not saying anything bad about any
> of the above: just that they don't meet my requirements, right now. I
> considered other non-Gnome canvas options too such as QGraphicsView
> and Webkit <canvas> and decided against both due to very difficult
> implementation details.
> 
> I suspect that this will make Gnometris more attractive for embedded
> use since many mobile devices now support OpenGL--though, no one has
> said they will use it for embedded use.
> 
> I solicited objections to using clutter on our gnome-games mailing
> list and on my blog which is aggregated on Planet. There were no
> objections.
> 
> Yes, it's yet another canvas. But, it appears to be widely available
> in distributions and no one is (yet) proposing it for inclusion in the
> Gnome officially.
> 
> With a little work, the new rendering engine will add a lot of "bling"
> for very little coding investment. It will probably be something--at
> least--worth mentioning in the release notes. The fact that some
> drivers do not yet have OpenGL support is irrelevant as there are no
> plans to deprecate the existing theme engines.

If Clutter is built on top of opengl exclusively (correct me if I'm
wrong), then:
  1. It does not use Cairo;
  2. It might not work if opengl is not available;
  3. It might not integrate nicely with gtk+ printing;

Maybe these concerns don't apply to gnome-games.  However, Gnome
applications in general should be concerned about them IMHO.

On the other hand, Cairo has failed to live up to the promise of
hardware acceleration.  After years of development with no significant
results on the hardware acceleration front (when compared to pure
OpenGL) perhaps it deserves this fate...

Not taking sides here, just providing some comments.  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
"The universe is always one step beyond logic" -- Frank Herbert