progress report on ardour port to gtkmm

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

ardour, a digital audio workstation for posix-like operating systems,
has been undergoing a port from gtk-- to gtkmm. it has taken 6 people 2
months of part time work so far: there are 60-70,000 lines of GUI code
involved, and the port included switching from using the C level
GtkCanvas to libgnomecanvas, writing wrappers for 4 new Canvas items,
porting 16+ CList/CTree widgets to the TreeView, and finding new
equivalents for several hacks forced on us by GTK+ v1.X and gtk--.

i am happy to report that the new code base is much cleaner than before,
and that as of today, the program does at least start up and run before
crashing.

no idea how long the remaining cleanup will take, but although this has
taken long enough that a port to Qt could probably have been done in the
same time (thus buying us native Cocoa appearance), i feel pretty good
about the continuing decision to use gtkmm.

--p