Re: [Pan-devel] Progress update on multi-threading of pan uudecode code

[Calin A. Culianu]

> >
> Sounds like you have taken the more complicated approach of creating a
> new type of task.  From my reading of the code, a few changes to
> task-article are all that would be required.  Add one or two functions
> to the class, make the decode function queue the data to the worker
> thread and add the other required bits.

I didn't create a new type of task, I merely added a couple of new states 
to the existing task.  I actually had a bug somewhere else where it was 
making the remove calls not work (the logic for deciding if a task is 
active was faulty).  That's fixed now.

Anyway, yeah, essentially I just added a bit of code to the task-article.

> One of the cases you may have missed is that the gui can't be safely
> updated from the worker thread.  This means that error logging  is a
> problem.

Heh, what do you take me for, a novice?  ;)

Of course I am not updating the GUI from another thread -- that would be 
impossible on most platforms as GUI updates should only happen from the 
main thread, as per GTK+ specs.  On X it crashes programs.  That's a 
pretty basic thing to know.. ;)

There is a polling timer function that runs as a GSource function and it 
periodically locks a mutex, takes some status data, and unlocks a mutex 
and gives the data to the GUI.  This polling function runs in the main 
thread, of course.  This status data is necessary so the GUI can tell the 
user what the progress of the decode is.

Anwyay my changes are done and I am quite happy with them.  I still need 
to clean some things up in terms of elegance/readability but if anyone 
wants I can upload the sources I have to my webserver and provide a URL to 
the mailing list so you guys can d/l and test.  Or I can provide a patch 
against the latest SVN.  Whatever works for you guys.

Anyone want to test it?


-Calin