Comment 8 for bug 819780

The (Freeciv) upstream ticket for the problem described here is <http://gna.org/bugs/?18243>.

We first noticed trouble with Gtk+ 2.24.5. It seemed to have come in with the upstream commit "gdk: Make background changes queue a repaint". After a number of trouble reports (not just with Freeciv), various distros (Gentoo, Arch) reverted that patch in their Gtk packages, and Gtk upstream also reverted it before shipping 2.24.6. So we (Freeciv) thought we'd get away with it.

However, Ubuntu had the Gtk patch (010_make_bg_changes_queue_repaint.patch) prior to 2.24.5 (I think perhaps it came from Ubuntu originally?), and re-added it by 2.24.6-0ubuntu5, which is what shipped with Oneiric. So, vanilla Freeciv (and perhaps the other affected apps?) will have trouble for so long as Ubuntu keeps this Gtk patch.

It's a bit unfortunate that non-Ubuntu-packaged Freeciv builds will seemingly need a workaround when running on Ubuntu for the foreseeable future. There's some hope that our move to gtk3 may fix it in passing, but that's some time away from release.

I've done almost no technical investigation into whether Freeciv is doing something wrong or ill-advised to provoke this behaviour. If someone more familiar with the matter has suggestions for a quick upstream fix, that'd be most welcome...