Re: Opening dialogs outside the Gtk thread?

[Matthias Kaeppler <matthias finitestate org>]

Tim Janik wrote:
> you can use gtk functions from any thread, as long as you take care to
> acquire the gtk lock around any gtk functions:
>
>   GDK_THREADS_ENTER ();
>   fire up dialog here.
>   GDK_THREADS_LEAVE ();

Yep, I could do that. However I was told that the cleaner approach is to 
use a dispatcher (Glib::Dispatcher) and make sure that the GUI is only 
modified in the Gtk main thread. I also noticed strange behavior when 
using these functions when I didn't wrapped each and every call in them 
(making my code extremely ugly since I quite often need to make GUI 
calls from other threads).

Besides, this lock/unlock thing doesn't seem to be the whole story. For 
example, my program will only lock up when I create and show a modal 
dialog inside the second thread, while the dialogs I use to display 
transfer progress (which were created--but not shown!!--in the main 
thread) never crash my program when showing/hiding them! That just 
doesn't make sense.

Since Nautilus, as I pointed out, also doesn't seem to suffer from this 
inter-thread GUI problem, I am sure I am missing something. I thought 
maybe someone here knows since I was pretty sure that the Nautilus 
developers read this list.

Regards,
Matthias