Still no new theme engine in gtk-2.9?

[Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy gmail com>]

Hi,

Just had a look to the recent gtk-2.9 snapshot, but as far as I can
see its still based on the old gtkstyle theme engine,
which requires users to pass a as target GdkWindow - which has to be a
server-side resource.
For non-gtk applications (Firefox, OpenOffice, Java) this means a
major burden, reading back from server-side pixmaps frequently.
E.g. 2/3 of the cycles Firefox requires to paint my GMail inbox a
single time, are spent themeing the checkbox-widgets.
When disabling gtk theming, painting performance improves by a factor of 3x.

I am always told to wait for the fancy, new theme engine which will be
integrated in GTK3, however I can't see a lot of progress on this
side.
If the new engine won't make it in, it would be great if the existing
theme engine could be converted to accept a cairo surface, this way
transparency as well as image-surface support would make most
developers happy.

- Clemens