Re: Arch support in Meld

[Stephen Kennedy <stevek gnome org>]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 13:37 -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> > The current blocking behaviour of all clients is pretty bad. I've
> > experimented with adding the fd to the gobject loop instead with some
> > good results.
> 
> What about using real multithreading?  On Arch, the startup operations 
> can be very slow on large trees, so it would be nice for Meld to be 
> usable before they had completed.

[cc-ed to the new meld mailing list]

I'm a little reluctant to use real multi threading because in many cases
it turns out to be more difficult than cooperative threads. For
instance, if you spawn 10 diffs from a dirdiff say, co-op threads allow
the current doc to get most of the cpu while backgrounding the others.
Real threads in python don't have such fine grain control.

If the startup ops are done in a separate process, then I'm confident
that using input-watch will get good performance.

Also, I've been keeping the option of a win32 port open. Historically
threads there are (were?) problematic.

Stephen.