spawn functions?

[haratron <haratron gmail com>]

Hello,

it seems that the spawn* functions of Gtk have not been ported to gtk2-perl.
I have this problem where I need to launch an external process from a
button's click callback. It's a TTS (text to speech) application that
has play, pause and stop buttons. The actual speech is been done by a
python script that I need to execute (don't ask..). The GUI in
gtk-perl shouldn't block, so that I am able to e.g. press pause/stop
while the voice speaks. I've tried a lot of ways but it always ends up
to one of the following:
- GUI gets blocked and I can't press pause/stop buttons
- GUI doesn't block (usually when I'm forking from within the
callback) but once the python script is done speaking, the gtk-perl
GUI is closed as well. I read this is a problem of gtk and there are
the spawn* functions to compensate for that.

How can I do this?