implement org.freedesktop.Geoclue.Position iface for localnet ?

[arno]

Hi, thanks for your reply :)

Le lundi 22 février 2010, à 00:00:29 +0200, Jussi a écrit : 
> 
> The use cases for this include
> * a panel applet that shows the current location (from master) and a
> way to correct it: a text entry and/or a map widget.
> * twitter client that uses geoclue but lets user correct the location
> 
> The basic needs are:
> 1. We want to let users define their location manually, possibly from
>    several applications
> 2. This manual input must be able to override other sources
>    (so users can correct wrong location info)
> 3. we should "save" this manual info for later use
>    (based on MAC address, possibly other things)
> 4. saved info must be easily modified/erased

I can see two other needs:

* have a default position, which does not depend on the gateway or anything 
else. Ie: user wants its software to believe he is in position XY no matter 
where he really is.

* set an accuracy: so user can tell: I'm not further than xx meters or 
kilometers from position XY.

I'm thinking here about web geolocation where websites can ask for location. 
For privacy reason, user may wish to give a wrong position or an inaccurate 
one.

> Originally I only implemented Address interface in manual &
> localnet, but I do agree Position should be covered as well:
> clicking a location on a map is obviously a use case for that.

yes :)

> That said, I'm not at all sure the current implementation in
> 'manual' & 'localnet' is good: They were quite ad-hoc -- this is the
> reason there's no real documented API for them... It might make
> sense to evaluate the design now and define a proper API if you want
> to do some work on this.
> 
> 
> Some questions/ideas:
> 
> * Do we need separate 'manual' and 'localnet' providers? I'm
> starting to think we don't: the "valid_for" property in manual
> didn't turn out to be useful, and if we remove that the
> functionality is very much covered by localnet already... The
> provider name could be better, like "user-set" or something.

I hadn't look at the manual provider before. But yes, it looks quite similar 
to localnet.

> * User provided information should probably trump even more
> "accurate" other providers, when master selects current provider. I
> guess this could be done with e.g. a flag in .provider-file?

then, why have one more accuracy level, and set user-set provider to that 
level. Then, it will be preferred over current providers. Also, from 
documentation, it appears, horizontal_accuracy and vertical_accuracy are 
defined only if accuracy level is not GEOCLUE_ACCURACY_LEVEL_DETAILED. So, in 
order to meet the use cases I describe earlier localnet needs to have its 
accuracy level increased anyway.

> 
> * Currently localnet works based on MAC address. Are there other
> things we could use? We should also probably start looking at the
> type of the network we're on: I assume this method is not a very
> good one on a GSM data connection for example.

random thought: may be use public ip which could be fetched from sites like 
showmyip.com or other similar ones. I don't known if that idea is a good one 
though.

> * When defining the API for setting a manual position, make sure
> it's possible to remove the manual position as well.

yes, it's really important.

> One related note: I think a "ReverseGeocode.freeform_to_address()"
> would be very useful addition in combination with localnet. Think
> about the Twitter client example:
>  * user inputs something like "Helsinki"
>  * the app uses freeform_to_address() and then saves the received
>    location with localnet

I'm not sure I understand.
Do you mean localnet should implement org.freedesktop.Geoclue.ReverseGeocode ?
Or should that method be implemented by geoclue-geonames provider ?


I'll try to work on that project at the end of the week

regards
arno
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