[sldev] I found a possible problem on linux (gdk/gtk related)

[Carlo Wood]

My question is: what percentage of the users is using linux?

Here I am assuming that linux users, and only linux users, are
using the GTK part (and gstreamer).

I have reason to believe that GTK is not being used thread-safe,
which should cause random crashes on linux. The reason that I
believe this is because I started to use GTK seriously from
a new thread which immediately caused very frequent crashes
(more than 95% of the time) which led me quickly to find out
that gdk threading wasn't initialized (no locking takes place
at all in the current viewer).

I added that initialization and locking, and added some necessary
(missing) locking calls... until my new thread ran perfectly.

However, what I run into now are deadlocks (without using my new
thread). This indicates that the viewer (without my changes) is
using gdk/gtk from two different threads at the same time (and
without locking thus). That this works in most cases could be
just luck.

I was/am planning to provide a patch for this, but I'm busy :p
So, hence the question at the top. I'd expect crashes on linux
while people are playing music and open a file picker window
at the same time; if this is not the case, then I guess that
the gstreamer mainloop doesn't bite the filepicker by coincidence,
what would make this a not so hight priority to fix though.

Carlo Wood