The G_CONST_RETURN define in GLib is, and has always been, a bit fuzzy.
We always used it to conform to the platform, at least for public-facing
API.
At first I assumed it has something to do with brain-damaged compilers
or with weird platforms where const was not really supported; sadly,
it's something much, much worse: it's a define that can be toggled at
compile-time to remove const from the signature of public API. This is a
truly terrifying feature that I assume was added in the past century,
and whose inception clearly had something to do with massive doses of
absynthe and opium — because any other explanation would make the
existence of such a feature even worse than assuming drugs had anything
to do with it.
Anyway, and pleasing the gods, this dubious feature is being
removed/deprecated in GLib; see bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644611
Before deprecation, though, we should just remove its usage from the
whole API. We should especially remove its usage from Cally's internals,
since there it never made sense in the first place.
This adds a priority property to all ClutterActorMetas. The
ClutterMetaGroup keeps the list sorted so that higher priority metas
remain at the beginning of the list. The priority is a signed integer
with the default as zero. An actor meta can therefore be put before
all default metas with a positive number, or after with a negative
number.
There are constants to set an 'internal' priority. The intention is
that applications wouldn't be allowed to use these values so that we
can keep special internal metas to that are before or after all
application metas.
The property isn't a real GObject property because for now it is
completely internal and only used to implement the 'transparency'
property of ClutterActor. ClutterMetaGroup doesn't currently resort
the list if the property changes so if we wanted to make it public we
should either make it construct-only or make the meta group listen for
changes on the property and resort accordingly.
The methods in ClutterActor that get the list of metas now use a new
function that filters out internal metas from the meta
group. Similarly for clearing the metas, the internal metas are left
in.
ClutterActorMeta is a base, abstract class that can be used to derive
classes that are attached to a ClutterActor instance in order to modify
the way an actor is painted, sized/positioned or responds to events.
A typed container for ActorMeta instances is also provided to the
sub-classes can be attached to an Actor.