Dear
Ubuntu-phone mailing list, I have spent a few weeks
developing an offline routing / navigation application
(LGPL) based on openstreetmaps / libosmscout. I want to
publish the app in the Ubuntu App Store, but I am facing a
problem: I need read access on a location on the SD card. I
will explain why. 1.) The maps take quite some space on the
device (Netherlands is 1.3GB, Germany is 4+ GB). At least on
the BQ Aquaris this space is not available in the home
directory, at least not if you also want to remain with some
space available. 2.) The maps have to be converted to a
binary format with a tool on the PC. Until I got some server
space and time to host some readily converted maps, the user
will have to transfer maps manually to the phone. If this
would be the app data space, that location is not by default
readable if you browse the phone on the PC. 3.) Converting
the maps on the phone is not really an option, as the
process uses several GB as temp space, and on an i7 pc it
can take over 1 hour for a map of a small country. For now
there are no good apparmor rules that matches the need of
this application, Picture read could be possible, however it
needs the maps to be placed in
<SD_CARD>/Pictures/osmscout. That is an ugly solution,
but it works. Another solution is to set the app as
unconfined, and use the location
<SD_CARD>/Maps/osmscout. However this is not the
solution to allow for any app, I think this app really adds
value to the Ubuntu phone. Would it be possible to create an
app-specific rule that allows (Read, and maybe later Write)
access to <SD_CARD>/Maps/? Or otherwise to allow this
app to be published as unconfined? The source code for the
app can be found here:
https://github.com/fransschreuder/libosmscout
The tool to convert maps can be obtained on a desktop: sudo
apt-add-repository ppa:fransschreuder1/osmscout-import sudo
apt-get update sudo apt-get install osmscoutimportgui0
Thanks for your comments, Regards, Frans Schreuder
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