Problems with Tkinter and threads

The TCP communication takes place in a separate thread. When I receive
data, I generate an event in the Python application thus:

app.event_generate("<<myevent1>>")

Tkinter is simply not
thread safe and generating events from another thread can trigger race
conditions and who knows.

Does this mean that I cannot even call the main thread's after_idle
method from another thread?

My Tkinter application has to receive events from a TCP connection. I
have chosen to do this in the following manner:

The TCP communication takes place in a separate thread. When I receive
data, I generate an event in the Python application thus:

app.event_generate("<<myevent1>>")

This is where the problem is: if you do just a event_generate without
specifying the 'when' option, the binding is fired immediately in the
current thread. To be sure that an event is created and that the thread
switch actually happens, do:

app.event_generate("<<myevent1>>", when='tail')

and things should work fine.

Eric Brunel wrote:

>This is where the problem is: if you do just a event_generate without
specifying the 'when' option, the binding is fired immediately in the
current thread. To be sure that an event is created and that the thread
switch actually happens, do:

app.event_generate("<<myevent1>>", when='tail')

and things should work fine.

Nice!

Obviously, there are important things that I don't know about Tkinter.
Unless I'm much mistaken, neither Fredrik Lundh's "An Introduction to
Tkinter" nor John W. Shipman's "Tkinter reference: a GUI for Python"
mentions the when='tail' option.