I ran across some problems with GtkSubprocess, and I figured out that it is related to using threads, and is there a way to make it immune to concurrency problems?
I have this program that does some operations on a file, which are individually represented by GtkListBoxRows. When the GSubprocess finishes, and I attempt to remove the list box row, the program segfaults. BTW, each file has its own process, so if a user loads 10 files, there will be 10 threads (this is managed by GThreadPool). Interestingly, if I comment out the code that launches the process, and the code that blocks the thread function till the process finishes, the program does not segfault. So I deduced that GSubprocess is having problems with concurrency. The error produced varies a lot, so this must be due to time-related problems.
I wanted to use GSubprocess because it is relatively easy to get the output of the command, which I need. Will I need to move my invocations of GSubprocess outside of the thread function?
I found out that it is not safe, due to its internal implementation in the GTK+ source code. And you should not even use threads in an application as well, as stated here. Here is my workaround: create the process in the main loop, and wait for the process to terminate using the async version of the call. Thus you avoid threads.