Guilhem Bonnefille <[email protected]> writes: > > Reading the roadmap of FoxtrotGPS, two points attracted my attention. > The first one concerns the GPS access. You plan to use "libgps". > Do you evaluated an higher layer? I'm thinking about geoclue. > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue
Yes, at least for the time being, the plan is to use libgps--mainly because Timo Juhani Lindfors had already done most of the work in that direction for tangoGPS, and it's becoming increasingly apparent that we just need *something* to support the new gpsd protocol as it gains wider adoption. We've basically been broken by the inflexibility of `just' maintaining our own internal implementation of the gpsd protocol, so the first goal is simply to become un-broken. To that end, I merged Timo's patches into the trunk today--along with a minor tweak to allow us to handle the increased range of some values reported by libgps beyond what the tangoGPS parser was capable of reporting (e.g.: our codebase assumed that localtime() could never fail, but libgps is capable of reporting `unknown time' in a format that causes localtime() to correctly fail rather than reporting the epoch). GeoClue looks pretty awesome, though; I wouldn't put it on the roadmap as a definite just yet, but I'd love to see someone experimenting with it. If you're interested in helping but have to make a choice as to where you should focus your efforts, though, I'll ask you to focus on something of higher priority--which happens to be your second point: > The second one concerns the "friends" part. You plan to use XMPP and > youlock.net services. Well, XMPP and youloc.net are described on the website as the `obvious candidates'. They were the first things that sprang to mind as options for established, open-standards systems that seemed like they would make sense as a basis for the sort of functionality that currently exists in tangoGPS and FoxtrotGPS (currently using what is, as far as I can tell, a proprietary web service). I was delighted to see XEP-0080 <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0080.html>, because it made it apparent that other people were at least working on the same idea, and that it might actually gain enough traction in the community to take hold as a standard such that it wouldn't just be us driving it. The more I look into it, the more it seems like my intuition was right-- that something XMPP-based is the way forward. > Do you evaluated the telepathy framework? It already implement > geolocation of friends over XMPP. > http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/ There hasn't been any discussion about the possibility of using Telepathy yet--I was not aware that it already had support for doing Geolocation over XMPP; that's exactly the sort of thing that I like to hear, though :) Do you have any experience with these facilities? > Of course, my two ideas bring HUGE dependencies, compared to > home-made/raw solutions. But they simplify the specific code and > allow a better integration with other services. Furthermore, these > framework are already packaged in small devices like Nokia N900. That's certainly a consideration. I'm not particularly fearful of depending on other packages per se--the bigger question for us is perhaps not so much `how many dependencies?' as it is `how much overhead is there?': if we add too many layers, do we have to worry about bogging-down our CPU or blowing-up our memory-footprint and disk-storage requirements? Although it may be contrary to intuition, depending on more (popular) shared libraries can actually be a way of *reducing* memory-footprint, but it really depends on how well the goals behind each component align with our own goals. If components are already in use on `small devices', that's a good sign. Having said that, I think the N900 is a much `bigger' system in some ways than my FreeRunner is; I wonder if I'm actually the lower bound-- is anyone interested in running FoxtrotGPS on something `smaller' (less RAM, less persistent storage, and/or a slower CPU/bus) than the FreeRunner? > What's your opinion about these ideas? I can imagine you're not > interested yet in them because they bring lot of lower priority work. > But I also can imagine to find time to give an help about these > topics. So I need to know if you will be interested in them, if it > worth to invest time in these directions. Oh, I'd think that using Telepathy would be a way of *saving* work, wouldn't it? Especially if they've already done the geolocation stuff for us. This is exactly the sort of input I've been hoping to get from the community. I think there's probably less of a need to move from direct use of libgps to GeoClue than there is a need to replace the `friend finder' back-end--with libgps now integrated so that we can actually support both new and old gpsd servers, and reconstruction of the missing GladeXML file nearing completion, replacing the proprietary `friends & IM' subsystem is of increasing priority. So far, your suggestion of using Telepathy & Gabble to accomplish it is the best (and only) one that we have :) So, unless someone else offers a critique of Telepathy/Gabble (I don't yet have any experience with it, myself) or suggests a different toolkit to use, I'm inclined to say "let's go for it". -- "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))." _______________________________________________ This message is sent to you from [email protected] mailing list. 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