[Marble-devel] Geolocation module

[John Layt]

On 18 February 2014 23:28, Kevin Krammer <krammer at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2014-02-18, 14:40:17, Mirko Boehm wrote:
>> at FOSDEM I met Zeeshan Ali who told me about his work on geolocation and
> that it would be cool if it were re-used across desktops. I don't know much
> about the topic, but his work looks cool to me. Here is what he wrote:

>> Is anybody involved in any kind of geolocation work and can get in touch
>> with Zeeshan about it?
>
> I am not involved in any geolocation work but if this is mainly about making
> geoclue2 available as a position provider for Qt applications then contacting
> the people working on QtLocation might be the way to go.
> It already seems to have a geoclue provider plugin, but that could be geoclue1
>
> https://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qtlocation/source/4c0599e2537a439f59ee91e1561c1c3ecf0b34e0:src/plugins/position/geoclue
>
> That is for Qt5, so it would take a while until it is used by KDE applications
> developers.

Yes for Qt5.2 onwards the new QtLocation module is the option I
recommend for general use in KDE Generation 5, as it is just the
location services api without the mapping api and so is now very
lightweight, i.e. doesn't pull in Qt3D when all you want to know is
what country you are in.  It currently only uses Geoclue 1, but the
maintainer is aware of Geoclue 2 and it is on his feature list to
implement support.  (I did ask for the data containers to be in QtCore
so we could pass data around without even needing QtLocation, but that
was opposed by the maintainer).

In Qt4 the QtMobility module was using Geoclue 1, but we didn't
recommend it's use in KDE due to the heavy dependency requirements and
possible data licensing issues.

Marble already uses Geoclue in KDE4, and I think there are other apps
using it directly.

Note that it is not recommended to use Geoclue directly in KDE apps as
it is platform dependent, we prefer to use an abstraction layer like
QtLocation that will work on all platforms, including OSX and Windows.

Cheers!

John.