Dependency Proposal: Clutter 0.6.2, ClutterMM 0.6

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

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.