Help Needed: gnome-open and apps patching

[Warren Togami]

GNOME 2.6 added the "gnome-open" utility which launches the browser that 
is chosen by the user in "Preferred Applications".  gnome-open reads the 
appropriate keys from gconf then launches the browser.  While gnome-open 
is not a long-term solution for cross-desktop compatibility (like with 
KDE), it allows us to have better desktop application integration within 
the short time-frame of the FC2 release schedule.  It also gives us a 
better alternative to the highly problematic "htmlview" script.

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