GTK 2.18, GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS, and Xfce

[Mike Massonnet]

Hello Mark,

2010/1/15 Mark Kane <mark at mkproductions.org>:
> Hi everyone.
>
> Since updating to GTK 2.18 a while ago, I started noticing screen
> corruption/artifacts in several GTK applications. Setting
> GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before launching applications clears the issue up
> right away.
>
> My question is, what is the best way to handle this in Xfce?

Well, either it has been fixed meanwhile in a newer version of stable
2.18 or in devel 2.19. If not it has to be reported to Xfce, unless
you are able to write down a simple test case to reproduce the bug and
thus reporting it directly to GTK+.

I'm running GTK+ 2.18 (currently .5) flawlessly here since quite a
long time and I never noticed any issue. Never.

> Terminal
> for example experiences the corruption unless GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is set
> which I have done through the launcher entry, but several other
> applications also have issues without it set so it seems incorrect to
> have to do this manually for every one.
>
> Is there a way to set this environment variable globally for all
> applications launched through any method in Xfce? I have tried
> setting/exporting it in ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc and my own ~/.cshrc many
> times and different ways to see if it would help, however it does not
> seem to have any effect.

The xinitrc script would be perfect, should work from the file ~/.xinitrc with:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Although I don't use any of this special files anymore to login, I was
used to the file ~/.xsession with startxfce4 at the end.

> >From searching online I haven't found a huge amount of reports of
> people having to set this manually for many applications, so is there
> something I might be missing on it in general? From my understanding, a
> change in GTK 2.18 might require applications to be updated to be
> compatible, and GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 turns off the new client side
> window feature and restores the previous behavior. I haven't seen many
> mentions of this being required for Xfce software like Terminal.
>
> Some examples of software that require this to be set to work
> properly are Xfce's Terminal, xfwm4-settings (the keyboard tab gets
> corrupted if not set), Midori, Claws-Mail, and gLabels.
>
> For the Xfce apps, do those need to be updated to be compatible with
> GTK 2.18, or might there be another issue here specific to my setup?

I'm not able to answer this. A place I would recommend is a FreeBSD
forum, you might find users with the same issue for this specific OS I
think.

There is nothing to change in the GTK+ applications, we don't decide
to draw with or w/out csw, if there is a bug with it than it has to be
fixed in the library.

> Thanks very much in advance,
>
> -Mark
> FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE [amd64]
> xfce-4.6.1
> Terminal-0.4.3
>

My 2 cents,
-- 
Mike