Applause for that stance.
As we all know, the history was written by those who survive. So, what I miss all times in those discussions was the point that DAW’s clime for themself to use GUI toolkits like GTK or QT, but force plugin developers to wrote there owns. Just count it down, how may DAW’s do you use with how many plugins? So the situation we are now have is that 100drets of LV2 plugin developers wrote there own toolkits instead develop dsp related stuff. Just, because 3 or 4 DAW developer say “This toolkit is mine”.
That means, if a DAW use there own toolkit, there is no issue at all with plugins using GTK or Qt, or “You Name It”. At least, Reaper does that, … does that, . . . . .
The issue with GTK and Qt is not that the host uses it.
It’s that different versions of GTK cannot exist in the same address space. The same for Qt.
So, any combination of plugins or hosts that use different versions of GTK or Qt will cause issues. It might be a plugin and the host, or two different plugins.
It’s also unclear why anyone would naturally gravitate towards GTK or Qt, which are clearly GUI toolkits that provide a central event loop for the application, when writing a plugin that is meant to be a statically linked, standalone shared object. They are also toolkits that provide almost no widgets useful to most plugin GUI authors.
Just checkout the “Programing with LV2 book”, the first GUI example you’ll find is still, . . . gtk based.
https://lv2plug.in/book/#_sampler_ui_c
and it was this way thins ever.
In Linux, were either distributions take care about the used toolkit version, or, when the user compile by itself, there wont be any issues introduced by toolkit versions.
To make that clear, the issue with calf in ardour is clearly introduced by ardour using a special gtk version which no distribution nor a user would be able to use, so no way to build Calf against the same GTK version. And now, when Ardour using GTK implemented as a fixed include own toolkit witch use symbols from toolkits which are usually free available, without allow to build against a official version of this toolkit, well, as I said in my first post, the winner takes it all and wrote the history.
Please, don’t take my words personal, it’s just that I was bitten by the same snake. I’ve done my own toolkit for my plugs, and now wayland comes around. Would I start again the same jumble? No, I wouldn’t.
In the context of “Linux distributions”, they have all (? most already, all soon) dropped GTK2 entirely …