gaim idle overrides spec'd message (WTF?) and a few less agonizing gaim quandries

[Christopher Hicks <chicks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I've recently been sucked into doing IM by one of my good friends.  Its 
been far less painful than I remember icq being.  There's only been one 
major rub: why does gaim override my specified away message with the idle 
message?  This is really irritating.  If I know I'm going to be gone and 
I've put up something specific to let people know that I'd really like 
that to stick and override the idle timeout default.  I know I could 
change the idle timeout default away message each time to convey the 
relevant information, but that really seems to defeat the purpose of 
having customizable away messages.  I've had this happen to me twice with 
the Fedora gaim-1.0.0-0.FC2 rpm installed on an Opteron box.

If this is a known bug can someone point me to a patch or a bugzilla page 
or something?  I've looked in google and Red Hat's bugzilla but nothing 
seemed to be relevant.

Also:

- is there anything out there that makes it easy to move gaim preferences 
between machines?

- I'd like to have the same username work on my laptop and desktop.  I 
tried setting the jabber "resource" to something unique in each case but 
it still only let me login once.  Do I have to create different usernames 
for each computer I'm going to be on simultaneously?  I want to be able to 
send URL's between boxes through this for instance.

--
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare