You have to restart GAIM to get the message font to change after making a change in GNOME Menu->Preferences->Fonts. The UI font of gaim instantly updates, but the message font stays the same until a restart.
Upstream, is this one thing that will be possible after gaim begins using gconf? (I still dislike gconf horribly, but just curious.)
I'm not actually sure. I would expect that if there is no font face explicitly set in tools->preferences->interface->conversations->message text, then it would update on the second message sent in that conversation. incoming messages naturally use whatever font is specified in them.
After learning more about GNOME's architecture, this functionality is definitely blocking on gconf support. Novell has proposed gconf configuration to replace its current file based configuration, but upstream has resisted the idea for several good reasons and it remains to be seen if a future version of gaim will ever support it.
this isn't just a question of gconf support, it also hinges on how often we recreate the style used when no tools->preferences->interface->conversations->message text style is specified. if the UI font of gaim is successfully changing, then it stands to reason that we must not be recreating the send im style as frequently as we check the style for the UI. This could potentially be tracked down and changed, as the fact that the UI changes demonstrates that the pertinent information is in fact in the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 for us to read.
AFAIK, the way GNOME apps handle application font changes in real-time like Dan Williams is asking for in this report is attaching a function to the gconf key. When that gconf key, that function runs changing the application font. You are otherwise correct in everything you stated above. I see little benefit in adding gconf support for this reason alone. If gaim upstream however decides to add Novell's gconf support for the other reasons, then this would be possible to implement fairly easily. But again I see little real benefit in having this capability.
This would be XSettings, not gconf. Since Gtk+ does handle xsettings, we probably should as well.
It was not found in gaim-2.0.0-0.11.beta3.fc6.