g_io_channel_win32_new_fd

[Michiel de Hoon <mdehoon c2b2 columbia edu>]

Hi everybody,

The section on IO Channels in the glib manual says the following about 
g_io_channel_win32_new_fd ():

> If you have created a GIOChannel for a file descriptor and started
> watching (polling) it, you shouldn't call read() on the file
> descriptor. This is because adding polling for a file descriptor is
> implemented in GLib on Windows by starting a thread that sits blocked
> in a read() from the file descriptor most of the time. All reads from
> the file descriptor should be done by this internal GLib thread. Your
> code should call only g_io_channel_read().
Now I'd like to use g_io_channel_win32_new_fd on stdin with pygtk. In 
this case, reading from stdin is done in Python, which doesn't use 
g_io_channel_read internally. Hence, on Windows polling stdin using 
g_io_channel_win32_new_fd does not give me the desired behavior.
On unixes, using the corresponding g_io_channel_unix_new works fine.

So I was wondering if there is a fundamental reason why on Windows 
polling for a file descriptor needs to have its own thread. If not, 
might it be worth my time to look deeper into this?

--Michiel.