Comment 44 for bug 442078

Having just hit this, it's unfair to blame any particular group. You can't blame the eclipse team as "their code worked"; you can't blame the GTK team as "they followed the spec". Its just together, it makes the transition to Ubuntu 9:10 the most painful ubuntu upgrade for a while, certainly I'm not enjoying it much on the two machines I've upgraded.

If you ever have the opportunity to look at the windows OS code, you will see truckloads of compatbility flags that get set on an app-by-app basis; MS believe that backwards compatibility is the strength of their OS, though it adds to bloat, complicates testing, and hits performance (more code to pull in, more branch misprediction). Apple take a stricter view. I think here linux/ubuntu is taking the Apple view: you get it wrong, you deal with it. While it will be dealt with, it is causing a lot of short term pain.