window corruption/artifacts on long-running external command

[ITwrx]

I'm calling rsync after button click via execCmdEx from std/osproc. While these rsync processes are running, if i change focus to another desktop workspace (currently using xfce, but have seen this with gnome in the past) and go back to my owlkettle app, the window is corrupted with a black/dark grey color, or random artifacts until the rsync process(es) finish. Then, the gui returns to normal.

Is this an owlkettle/gtk4/x11/wayland issue? or i'm supposed to use spawn, or async, or something for the rsync process(es) to avoid this issue?

thanks

[ITwrx]

yeah, i think it's number two. It also explains another issue i'm having. I guess i thought there would be some hidden magic for the lazy or something... but execCmdEx is synchronous, so it's blocking my gui. I will leave this open, for now, in case anyone has any recommendations as to the best approach. Actually, rsync is usually getting called multiple times inside a loop, so maybe it's a chance for some performance optimization too.

[can-lehmann]

Yes, blocking inside an event handler will break your UI. As far as I can tell, startProcess is non-blocking, and should be a viable alternative.

[ITwrx]

Thanks for the response. I didn't know how to use startProcess and still get the output and exit code from rsync like the execCmdEx conveniently provides. No async execCmdEx and this async proc didn't work for me. Looks abandoned. That's OK, i just implemented threading, largely thanks to the owlkettle threading example.