[Marble-devel] Making geoclue more desktop agnostic.

[Inge Wallin]

Hi,

My name is Inge Wallin, and I'm one of the Marble[1] developers. Marble is an 
interactive desktop globe similar to Google Earth, and part of the KDE edu 
package. It's also a general map widget that is used in other Qt applications 
like digikam or a world clock as a plugin. It also exists in a Qt only 
version which makes it free of ties to the KDE desktop.

Marble has some rudimentary support for gps through gpsd, but we would like to 
add more general support for positioning. I have talked with Henri Bergius a 
number of times, and we really like Geoclue, both as a concept and also the 
way it's implemented. However, there is one thing that bothers us.

When we have talked to people in the KDE community, the thing that always 
comes up is the Geoclue dependency on gconf. We think it's a bad thing that a 
general service as Geoclue depends on something that is only used in one of 
the desktops, and that will drag in large other dependencies when installed 
on a machine. It's also probably a bad thing for embedded systems where 
available memory is smaller.

So, I suggest to remove that dependency.  When I look through the sources, I 
can only find one setting, namely "/apps/geoclue/master" in load_options() in 
main.c. So I hereby offer to create a patch that will make Geoclue use a 
standard text file in /etc.  I assure you that such a change will make it 
much more attractive to non-gnome people, and maybe even add developers from 
other parts of the free software community.

Henri asked me to send this mail to the list, so here it is.

	-Inge

[1] http://edu.kde.org/marble/