Geoclue 2.1.1

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeeshanak at gnome.org
Thu Jan 30 05:11:50 PST 2014


Hi,

Here is the another release of the re-write of geoclue. Changes since 2.1.0:

- 3GPP-based geolocation source.
  - Uses ModemManager to get cell tower info from 3GPP modem and uses
    opencellid.org's public API to translate that into a location.
- GPS modem-based geolocation source: If your 3GPP modem has a GPS, geoclue can
  now make use of it.
- WiFi-based geolocation source
  - Uses Mozilla Location Service to find location based on nearby WiFi
    networks.
  - Refresh location on changes in WiFi networks.
  - Option in configuration file to make geoclue use Google Maps Geolocation API
    rather than Mozilla Location Service.
  - Option in configuration file to enable submission of wifi data to Mozilla
    Location Service. If this option is enabled, the data is submitted each time
    geoclue gets a GPS lock. That means, its not completely autonomous and data
    is only submitted if an application, e.g gnome-maps requests current
    location with exact accuracy.
- API for clients to specify what level of geolocation accuracy they need,
  e.g city-level, street-level or exact etc.
- API to check if geolocation service is in use. Next version of gnome-shell
  will make use of that to show an icon in the panel to indicate to user that
  their location is being accessed.
- Application authorization agent
  - Make agent completely optional. We will revert this once we have a reliable
    mechanism to identify applications.
  - Identify agent and client applications by their desktop IDs rather than
    paths of their binaries.
  - Ability for agents to dictate the accuracy level allowed for clients.
  - Maintain a whitelist of clients in configuration that do not need agent
    authorization.
- Avoid redundant queries to web services.
- Install demo applications and provide a desktop file for them.
- Many more internal fixes and clean-ups.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require libnm-glib >= 0.9.9.0 (new dependency)
- Require libmm-glib >= 1.0 (new dependency)
- Require libxml-2.0 (new dependency)

Note to package maintainers: This version drops the requirement for geoclue
binary to be given 'ptrace' capability that was introduced in last release,
2.1.0.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak at gnome.org>
---------------------------------------

Geoclue is a D-Bus service that provides location information. The
primary goal of the Geoclue project is to make creating location-aware
applications as simple as possible, while the secondary goal is to
ensure that no application can access location information without
explicit permission from user.

Geoclue is Free Software, licensed under GNU GPLv2+. It is developed for Linux.

The aim of project is to utilize all possible sources of geolocation
to best find user's location:

* WiFi-based geolocation (accuracy: in meters)
* GPS(A) receivers (accuracy: in centimeters)
* 3G modems (accuracy: in kilometers, unless modem has GPS)
* GeoIP (accuracy: city-level)
* Geoclue can currently only do GeoIP and hence accuracy of
  geolocation is city-level at best. However, there are plans to add
  support for other sources mentioned above.

Geoclue used to also do (reverse-)geocoding but that functionality has
been dropped in favor of geocode-glib library.

Release tarball:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/geoclue/releases/2.1/geoclue-2.1.1.tar.xz
sha256sum: a2044e8b90bcaa6caea9aa706016945813e77a45cbff7c9ab45a81f843e938e5

D-Bus API documentation: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/geoclue/docs/

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124


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