progress bars in the background

[seandepagnier]

Is there any reason we shouldn't make opencpn always non-blocking, so that operations that take time simply operate in the background with a small progress bar rendered at the bottom with also a cancel option?

I think this would be useful for updating chart databases, parsing ENC files, merging/simplifying tracks and various plugin operations etc... Is there any real problem here?

[bdbcat]

Sean....

Welcome back. Hope you had a good passage.

I see no real problem in converting blocking operations to threads. It is just a matter of synchronization where necessary. Many of our classes/methods are not reentrant (global variables), nor thread-safe(wxWidgets message queue). So they need to be considered one-by-one.

Dave

[seandepagnier]

Another one is loading nav objects.

I think in most (or all cases) we don't need to write to global variables in the cpu intensive operations performed in the threads.