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Comment by archimedespi | Hacker News Reader

Why would stock GTK+ cause problems?

The most common reason is that we ship our own version of the clearlooks theme engine to ensure that we control the appearance of GTK+ widgets, and we load our own GTK2 RC file to define colors etc. for those widgets.

This leads to 2 errors, one irritating, one that prevents the program from functioning.

Irritating: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If this theme is based on clearlooks but contains declarations unknown to our (older) version of Clearlooks, you get errors.

Blocking: GTK+ loads the system GTK theme during a call to gtk_init(). If the theme file defines a "color theme", then when Ardour defines its own, GTK will block for ever, because of a bug in GTK+2. This doesn't happen if the system GTK theme has no color theme definition.

Those are the two main issues. They cannot be worked around without rebuilding the GTK+ stack so that it cannot or will not load the system GTK theme.

Thank you for explaining!

If you've contacted GTK about upstreaming your patches, what was their response? I'd be surprised if they didn't want to.

I interact regularly with GTK+ developers, and have been a regular contributor to GTK+ on OS X. They don't want our patches - they are very specialized and intended to deal with cases in Ardour that are not really a part of ordinary desktop apps. GTK+2 is now in maintainance mode anyway.

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