Re: Why not to split gmc and other gnome applications into threads?

[Martin Oberzalek <oberzalek chello at>]

On Sun, 7 Nov 1999, Antonio Campos wrote:

> This is something people would find very attractive in GNOME and GMC in
> particular...
> The other day I was using GMC and when I pressed on a big tgz archive
> for looking into it, GMC because responseless because it wasn't able to
> redraw itself. Even more, it wasn't able to redraw the icons on the
> desktop (because the icons depends on GMC and GMC was opening the big
> tgz file)...
> So it could be nice (like I think it's in Windows) that GMC and other
> GNOME (even GTK) applications split themselves into threads. So for
> example GMC could have a thread to redraw the icons on the desktop each
> 5 seconds or so, another thread could redraw the tree of directories on
> the left and other to redraw the icons of files on the right.
> Even more nice would be to make these threads callable for every GNOME
> application, so that every application could have a little GMC into
> itself if it needed it.

It's more difficult than in windows to make a simple thread, because when
you call the fork command, you create a new process. So you have to chose
a pipe ore something like this to communicate with the other thread.
But this is only an explanation and no excusion.