gtk app with threads

["Cristóvão B. B. Dalla Costa" <cbraga fs inf br>]

Hello

I'm creating an application which will download several large files. 
I've setup a progress bar to display during the download and I wish to 
keep it updated and not freeze the app display. I suppose threads are 
the obvious choice and I've created a separate thread to download the 
packages.

I suppose that I shouldn't mess with widgets from the second thread 
since I've already caused several errors to come up working that way and 
I'm currently attempting to install an idle handler on the main thread 
to update the display.

Problem is, the idle thread doesn't ever get called. I'm creating it as 
such:

   Glib->idle_add (sub { $self->update_progress (\$downloaded) });

Where $downloaded is a shared variable.

Does anyone here have experience with this type of problem? How would 
you recommend solving this particular design problem?

Thanks in advance,

Cristovao Dalla Costa.