No idea what happened with bug 317289, but Freeciv 2.2 builds just fine without libggz, and should not force me to install it unless I have USE=ggz
No, the configure script fails without it.
Again, I built and ran the server successfully without libggz. I accomplished this with the --nodeps flag to emerge (libggz was and is not installed).
yeah, no idea. Anyhow, it's fixed in 2.2.0 and 2.2.1. Thanks for the bug report.