running gimp with gtk 2.8.7 and cairo 1.0.2 on an linux Host and
NCD 256 color X Terminal produce the following message:

The program 'gimp' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)'.
  (Details: serial 998 error_code 8 request_code 72 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

this dosn't occur if I use an true color X-Terminal.

after some debugging I found:

in
src/cairo-xlib-surface.c
in function
  _draw_image_surface

XPutImage will be called with an ximage with depth 0 (!).