GTK 2.18, GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS, and Xfce

[Mark Kane]

Hi Mike and Robby, thanks for the replies.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010, at 13:10:12 +0100, Mike Massonnet wrote:
> 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.

I also am running 2.18.5 and noticed the issue after updating to
2.18 (from 2.16).

> 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.

I tried exporting it in ~/.xinitrc, ~/.xsession, and Xfce's own
xinitrc (~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc), but none of them seem to have any
effect on applications launched from the Xfce menu.

In further testing today I did make one discovery. If I launch these
same apps like Terminal, Midori, Claws, etc in twm or the Awesome window
manager, they work normally without GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS set to 1
anywhere, however in Xfce they need that to be set.

> 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.

Just to clarify, the corruption/artifact issue doesn't happen on all
GTK+ applications. For example, Terminal has the issue when
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is not set to 1 but ROXTerm works fine without it
set. Midori has the issue without it set but Firefox does not.

For one visual example, here is Terminal. When switching tabs, the area
where the terminal text normally appears has artifacts or goes blank
entirely. Highlighting the text area returns it back to normal, but it
happens again on every tab switch:

http://tntpowerhost.com/mixx941/freebsd/terminal_corruption_1.png
http://tntpowerhost.com/mixx941/freebsd/terminal_corruption_2.png

If you think it is a FreeBSD-specific problem I can post over there no
problem, but reading pages like these sound like some software might
need some changes for GTK+ 2.18 (I could be wrong though):

http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/10/what-gdk-native.html
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.18/gtk-migrating-ClientSideWindows.html

But then again it's odd that it's working perfectly for both you and
Robby...so maybe it is something FBSD specific or something in my setup?

Thanks again,

-Mark

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