[pygtk] Threading problem using pygtk on Win32

[Alexandre Fayolle]

Hello,

I'm using happily pygtk to develop Horn the user interface for Narval
(http://www.logilab.org). It runs very well under Linux, but I'm having
big troubles getting something under Windows. It looks like there's
something wrong with the thread support in pygtk win32 edition. I checked
Hans Breuer patch over pygtk 0.6.4 and it does look like there's a known
issue with threading in the patch, from the comments I saw. 

If we cut down to the skeletton of the app, the implementation is
something equivallent to:

----------------------8<-----------------------
from gtk import mainloop, timeout_add
import time
import thread,Queue

queue = Queue.Queue(10)

def ping_thread():
    while 1:
        t = time.time()
        print 'ping',t
        queue.put_nowait(t)
        time.sleep(0.7)


def pong():
    try:
        while 1:
            t0 = queue.get_nowait()
            t1 = time.time()
            print 'pong',t1, t1-t0
    except:
        return 1

thread.start_new_thread(ping_thread,())
timeout_add(1000,pong)
mainloop()
---------------------8<----------------------------


This works fine under linux, but under windows (winnt4.0, runnning on a
P133), I get pongs comming with a  9 seconds lag. So my question is:
 * is it just because my NT box is waaaaaay to slow ?
 * has it something to do with lines 31-32 of the patch which state:
+#if defined (_MSC_VER)
+#undef WITH_THREAD /* no thread support on win32 yet */

In that case what would be required to implement the thread support on
win32 ? I'm not yet very familiar with the innards of the python bindings
of gtk nor with the win32 port of GTK+, but I'm ready to get my shirt wet,
since I really need this feature. Any help/suggestion welcome.

Alexandre Fayolle
-- 
http://www.logilab.com 
Narval is the first software agent available as free software (GPL).
LOGILAB, Paris (France).