Module proposal: GtkGLExt for GNOME 2.22

[Andreas Røsdal <andreasr gnome org>]

Hello!

* Proposal: Include GtkGLExt in the GNOME developer platform.

* Purpose: GtkGLExt is an OpenGL extension to GTK+ 2.0, and if accepted 
into the GNOME developer platform could provide OpenGL support for any 
GNOME application where this is useful. Language bindings available for 
C, C++, Python, Scheme, Ruby, DUI, Inti, Perl, FreePascal.

GtkGLExt website: http://gtkglext.sourceforge.net/

* Dependencies:
- GTK+ 2.0
- OpenGL or Mesa
- GTK-Doc (optional)

* Resource usage: I suggest to migrate from the current sf.net project to 
GNOME FTP, GNOME SVN, GNOME bugzilla.

* Adoption: Fedora, Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions already 
include GtkGLExt.

* GNOME-ness: Both GNOME and GtkGLExt has a lot to gain by such an 
inclusion. GtkGLExt could benefit from the GNOME infrastructure, GNOME QA 
and release process, and increased development effort (improvements, 
bugfixes, documentation, i18n etc). GNOME would be enriched with the 
benefits of a good OpenGL extension for GTK+.

* "Election speech":

GtkGLExt is the best currently available OpenGL extension for GTK+ 2.0.
By accepting GtkGLExt into the GNOME development platform, this will give 
GtkGLExt increased development resources, more wide usage and 
availability, so that it will become the leading library for providing 
OpenGL support in GNOME applications.

GtkGLExt is stable and works well: There has been some effort to 
integrate gtkglarea into GTK+, but nothing has come of it yet.
The Clutter library is quite immature and not as widely adopted yet.
This proposal is therefore to incrementally improve GtkGLExt, rather than 
a more difficult solution where something has to be invented from scratch.

However, GtkGLExt is currently unmaintained. I will volunteer to maintain 
it if accepted as a GNOME module, and hope to work with the GNOME 
community to make it fit in well as a GNOME module.

For an example of a successful GNOME project using GtkGLExt, take a look 
at glChess. I co-maintained this module, and saw what GtkGLExt could do 
there. A challenge we had with using GtkGLExt was that it isn't a 
"blessed" external library, so it had to be optional (a runtime check in 
Python) if it could be used in the GNOME module GNOME Games. glChess 
allows rendering the chess board with GtkGLExt, see: 
http://live.gnome.org/glChess/

There has also been a lot of discussion about this in bug #119189
"Add OpenGL support to GTK+".

I'm very interested in seeing how GtkGLExt can improve GNOME!


 - Andreas Røsdal