Keeping a Tkinter GUI alive during a long running process

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-12-21, Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:

> I maintain a Tkinter application that's a front-end to to a package 
> manger, and I have never been able to find a way to keep the app from 
> locking up at some point during the piping in of the package manager's 
> build output into a text widget. At some point the buffer is overwhelmed 
> and the app simply can't respond anymore, or writes data to the text 
> widget after locking up for a period.
>
> I've long used the typical Tkinter design pattern of opening a pipe to 
> the external command, and letting it do its thing. However, after a 
> time, this locks up the app. If I try to throttle the buffer with some 
> combination of "update" or "after" or "update_idletasks," that keeps the 
> data flowing, but it comes in too slowly and keeps flowing in long after 
> the external process has terminated.

Isn't there a way in Tkinter to have a file descriptor produce an
event whenever it becomes readble?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3348757/how-to-make-tkinter-repond-events-while-waiting-socket-data

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