[Librem-5-dev] PyGTK+ app development and testing on qemu image

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 28/10/2019 14.56, David Boddie via Librem-5-dev wrote:

>> - In Android there is a clear "Activity Lifecycle": what to do when the
>> app is in view or not etc etc. In my case I would want to stop the mqtt
>> messaging while the app is not in focus.
>> But I could not find an PyGTK+ signal which is fired when my application
>> windows get's in focus or so. Did I miss something?
> 
> I think you need to be looking at some of these:
> 
> https://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/#Gtk-3.0/classes/Widget.html#signals
> 
> These are the ones that I would use to monitor the visibility of the
> application window.

Tried the signals of "Gtk.ApplicationWindow" could not receive anything
when I put my app in front the (phone) views....
But I'll also have a look at what LibHandy(?) would mean in this..

>> - While not having a real phone, is testing in the qemu VM a good way to
>> test? (looking at performance etc etc)... because:
> 
> The VM does not perform as well as it should and it's not exactly clear to me
> why. You can also test in your own native workstation environment - assuming
> that you are using a GNU/Linux distribution. When you have got everything
> working, then you can worry about granting the permissions needed for the app
> to run on the phone. You can always generate flatpaks for testing on your
> host system if you want to make sure that you have the permissions set
> correctly.

My problem only appeared on the VM, on my workstation it was ok. But I
think I fixed it (see below). The problem (freezing the app interface)
did not occur when I ran it on my workstation. So I was puzzled...

Key issue I think in my problem is that the MQTT-client lib is started
in a separate thread and is (via signal) calling GTK-gui updates...
The Gnome docs about threading [0] made me try to use " GLib.idle_add"
see [1] and now the gui does not freeze anymore.
I can even put my laptop to sleep (with VM running on it) and the app
starts again.
For future coders see [1] and [2] and do not update your gtk ui (like
labels etc) from a separate thread without the call I mentioned above.
Also when you let your 'update'-method return False, the call will only
be called once.

Hope this make sense to others  :-)

Thanks for the help!

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/PyGObject/Threading
[1]
https://developer.gnome.org/pygobject/stable/glib-functions.html#function-glib--idle-add