[Marble-devel] Geolocation module

[Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)]

Hi John,

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:43 AM, John Layt <jlayt at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.

Thats good news. geoclue1 is not just unmaintained (which it has been
for a while), the whole repo has been ripped off to really start from
scratch for geoclue2. So at this point, I will strongly recommend to
port away from it.

> 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,

Is it? We do have platform specific components but Ryan Lortie
recently made it possible to build geoclue without platform-specific
backends. Although this means that you'll only get geoip-based
(city-level accuracy) but still, it should now work on *BSD at least.

> we prefer to use an abstraction layer like
> QtLocation that will work on all platforms, including OSX and Windows.

I'm no expert in portability so you might have a point here when it
comes to Windows but AFAIK there is no native APIs on Windows that you
can use for this (maybe on Windows 8?) so I'd recommend working on
geoclue with me to make it work on all platforms of interest rather
than creating an abstraction layer on your end.

That would have actually been one opportunity to work together on
this. The only reason we are keeping geoclue on freedesktop.org is
that we are hoping for some contributions/collaborations from/with
other DEs, especially KDE.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124

P.S. Adding Bastien to CC who worked on geoclue1 for a while and was
the architect behind geoclue2.