GObject destruction

[Jacob Kroon <jacob kroon gmail com>]

Hi,
I've read the GObject tutorial, and I'm trying to understand how to 
implement the dispose/finalize
functionality. They way I see it, the you need to override dispose in 
GObjectClass, and that this
method should g_object_unref() any objects which the instance uses, and 
that finalize() should release
any allocated memory etc. Dispose might be called more than once, so one 
needs to guard against
multiple invocations using some sort of flag. My question is, will every 
class I create always need to have a
DISPOSED attribute (for instance a flag, or an int) in order to 
implement this correctly ? (Unless of course
the instance doesn't refererence any other instances, in which case I 
don't need to implements dispose()).

Maybe theres a way to implement it using a "destroy" signal, which each 
subclass connects a callback to,
and does its cleanup's in, and have only the parent class guard against 
multiple invocations. The parent class
would then implement dispose, have a flag guarding against multiple 
invocation, and do signal_emit("destroy")
in dispose(). Could this work ?

I've tried looking at Gtk+ code to see how GtkObject/GtkWidget's handle 
it, buts it's over my head.

I apologize in advance if I'm not giving enough information concerning 
my problem.

//Jacob