Separate Threads In Pygtk Application

I'm having some problems threading my pyGTK application. I give the thread some time to complete its task, if there is a problem I just continue anyway but warn the user. However

Solution 1:

Firstly, don't subclass threading.Thread, use Thread(target=callable).start().

Secondly, and probably the cause of your apparent block is that gtk.main_iteration takes a parameter block, which defaults to True, so your call to gtk.main_iteration will actually block when there are no events to iterate on. Which can be solved with:

gtk.main_iteration(block=False)

However, there is no real explanation why you would use this hacked up loop rather than the actual gtk main loop. If you are already running this inside a main loop, then I would suggest that you are doing the wrong thing. I can expand on your options if you give us a bit more detail and/or the complete example.

Thirdly, and this only came up later: Always always alwaysalways make sure you have called gtk.gdk.threads_init in any pygtk application with threads. GTK+ has different code paths when running threaded, and it needs to know to use these.

I wrote a small article about pygtk and threads that offers you a small abstraction so you never have to worry about these things. That post also includes a progress bar example.