Hello! I’ve been an occasional Ardour user for nearly a decade now. Happy to support it when I use it for projects and I’m glad to see it still thriving.
As GTK 2 has had its final release, Arch Linux (and I’m sure other distros) are beginning the long process of phasing it out of the repositories. One such application is Ardour. From what I understand, Ardour only uses GTK for integrating with the underlying OS (e.g. file choosers) while the majority of the UI is handled by Ardour’s custom toolkit (it’s really evolved into something nice looking over the years, great job!)
Anyway, is there some sort of expectation of if/when GTK2 will be removed from the rest of Ardour’s codebase?
Also even when moving away from gtk+, Ardour will keep depending on gdk2 for window and event system abstraction.
We’ve investigated and concluded that neither gtk3 nor gtk4 offers any benefit to Ardour, and hence we cannot justify spending time to migrate. Especially since it would set back Ardour development at least a year, likely more.
There’s a podcast where Paul elaborates on this subject.
One way to think about the GTK2 issue is: we (ardour developers) and our users (who support our work by getting ardour from ardour.org) have no problems caused by our use of GTK2 and even looking ahead several years, we don’t anticipate any problems will be caused by it.
Not only that, but the move to a newer version would only create new issues.
With that in mind, it’s hard to feel that motivated to even consider it.
Now, to be fair, i’m not really suggesting that distro-build users and self-builders are not also part of the community or not part of the user base.
However, we (Ardour developers) “figured out” a solution to this issue years ago, and that’s distributing our own distro-neutral package of the program. If we one day cannot build that, then we have a problem we will have to fix, but the fact that some distros may have difficulties building their own packages? it’s really hard for us to be concerned about this.