[Telepathy] straw man location API

[Simon McVittie]

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On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 at 15:42:37 +0200, mikhail.zabaluev at nokia.com wrote:
> GeoClue have made an unwieldy API for it with rigid flat structures and
> bit flags, Win32 style :-/

There's nothing wrong with bitfield flags - Telepathy has lots of them.
They're an efficient way to transfer, well, sets of flags.

I don't like some of their API (human-readable strings over D-Bus?
erm... are the backends expected to be localized?... and, as you say,
their civic location structs are rather rigid) but it's better
than inventing our own *again*. Have you brought up your concerns with
the GeoClue people?

I still maintain that unless GeoClue is so terrible that we consider it a
complete dead-end (and IMO that's not true), the way forward is for people
interested in Telepathy+geoloc to treat them as "the Telepathy of geolocation"
and use their formats by reference; and if their formats are crap, help them
to fix that before they freeze D-Bus API.

Otherwise, we end up maintaining a separate but broadly similar "geoloc
abstraction" API, and every UI (or Mission Control plugin) that supports
geoloc has to know how to translate between GeoClue and our API (with the
likely result that at least one implementation, probably the most popular, will
do it wrong).

Any volunteers to do Telepathy/GeoClue relations? I can give some pointers
on D-Bus API design if needed, but I'm not really enough of a GPS enthusiast
to know what the issues are.

(Daf, Rob: I don't suppose you talked to GeoClue people at LCA?)

    Simon
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