`xdg-open` handles IRC URIs incorrectly

[Josh Brown]

Binary package hint: xdg-utils

I'm running two IRC clients, XChat and Empathy.
When I run the command `xdg-open irc://chat.freenode.net/#gallery` nothing apparent happens in Empathy, and I get an error message in XChat: `Usage: URL <url>, opens a URL in your browser`.

 Ubuntu 10.04
 xdg-utils 1.0.2-6.1ubuntu3

[Joseph Becher (drazisil)]

To add, when I try irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee in Chrome, it attempts to launch xdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee

Nothing opens however. When I run this command in the terminal I rxdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee
ecieve the following:

joseph@snowdrift:~$ xdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee
gvfs-open: irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee: error opening location: The specified location is not supported

I have tried adding the following commands, in case there's an issue of the system missing the config:

$ gconftool-2 --set --type=string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/command 'xchat "%s"'
$ gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/enabled true
$ gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/need-terminal false

No change. This appears to be a common issue with Natty 10.04 and there appears to be no fix. Can you please advise if this is a bug (upsteam or no) or just a simple lack of documentation issue?

Thanks!

joseph@snowdrift:~$ uname -a
Linux snowdrift 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 03:31:50 UTC 2011 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

[Josh Brown (joshbrown)]

Upon inspection it seems the cause of this problem is the automatic addition of the '#' channel prefix when one already exists:
     <irc://chat.freenode.net/#irc> → xdg-open → /join #%23irc → ✗ Fails
     <irc://chat.freenode.net/irc> → xdg-open → /join #irc → ✓ Succeeds
Most IRC URLs do not include the '#' character and are therefore not a problem.

There must have been some software update in 11.04 because `xdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/#banshee` works fine for me whereas `xdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/%23banshee` yields `/join #%23banshee`. Major draft specifications unanimously agree that '%23' should yield a single '#'.

Major draft specifications:
  * <http://ietf.org/html/draft-butcher-irc-url-04#section-2.5.1>
  * <http://w3.org/Addressing/draft-mirashi-url-irc-01.txt>
  * <mozilla.org/projects/rt-messaging/chatzilla/irc-urls.html>

[Tudor Holton (tudor)]

This appears to have worsened. xdg-open irc://irc.gnome.org/banshee now calls gvfs-open, too!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[User0815 (user0815)]

is there a workaround?