Colin Watson reports that on pre-releases of Ubuntu 18.04, configure
events which don't actually involve a change of window size show up
annoyingly often. Our handling of configure events involves throwing
away the backing Cairo surface, making a fresh blank one, and
scheduling a top-level callback to get terminal.c to do a repaint and
populate the new surface; so a draw event before that callback occurs
causes the window contents to flicker off and on again, not to mention
wasting a lot of time.
The simplest solution is to spot spurious configures, and respond by
not throwing away the previous Cairo surface in the first place.