The following tasks need your help in order to better integrate the Linux desktop applications.
1) gaim default to gnome-open
Someone please submit an exact patch that can be added to the gaim*.src.rpm to change the default URL handler to Custom and using gnome-open.
2)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=109738
This patch will eventually go in so that the Preferred Applications chooser in order to properly set the gconf keys. The patch needs only trivial cleanup.
3) gnome-open should probably be patched to not reject "about:" URLs. While /usr/bin/gnome-open is within the libgnome package, I believe the code that needs fixing is within gnome-vfs2. If you can fix this, please submit the patch to upstream GNOME Bugzilla/CVS and let this thread know of the Bugzilla URL.
4) xchat and (soon) gaim already honors the gnome-open Preferred Application choice, but there are undoubtedly other applications that could be trivially patched to launch gnome-open for URL handling. Please let us know if you find such applications. If you submit an exact patch to insert into the SRPM, there is still a chance that it can be included before the freeze. Well, I hope so at least.
Warren