[pygtk] The throbber from firefox and idle handlers

[Geoff Bache]

Hi all,

I added a "Firefox throbber" to my application as described in the FAQ (e.g. http://eccentric.cx/misc/pygtk/pygtkfaq.html#23.37 as www.pygtk.org seems to be down right now)

It didn't work for me, and I discovered that this was because of idle handlers, which cause gtk.events_pending() to always return True and hence the loop suggested there
to loop forever. The loop looks like this:

while gtk.events_pending():
    gtk.main_iteration()

So I can fix this by removing all the idle handlers individually with gobject.source_remove, running this loop and then putting them back again afterwards with gobject.idle_add.

It then works, but it feels like a hack, and is problematic because I've now got a situation where there exists an idle handler in a separate library that doesn't know about my throbber.

Is there some better way to do this? It would be great if there was a way to temporarily disable all idle handlers without having to know exactly which ones they are and
how to put them back afterwards.

Regards,
Geoff