Features/LocationTracking

Location Tracking

Summary

Track the user's current location (and by extension, time zone) by various means.

This was pulled out of Features/TimeZoneAndLocation to keep track of the ideas from there that aren't going to make it for Fedora 10.

Owner

• Name:

Current status

• Targeted release: none
• Last updated: 2008-08-11
• Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

Automatic Location Detection

In some cases, it is possible to automatically detect the user's location: if the user has a GPS device attached to the computer, then obviously that can be used. There are also web services that can guess a computer's location with some degree of accuracy based on its IP address, router MAC address, or wireless ESSID (and NetworkManager lets us know when that stuff changes).

GeoClue is a project designed to interface to various local and online location services, and it provides a D-Bus interface for determining the current location. It has been packaged for Fedora (review bug 442693 ).

DHCP-based timezone tracking

DHCP servers can send an option to the client indicating the current timezone.

NetworkManager has a D-Bus interface that would allow the clock applet (or some other service) to notice when a new DHCP lease is assigned, and check for the timezone option, and do something useful with it. (intlclock bug 523324)

Location-based Services within Fedora

• We could automatically add a new location to the clock applet when the user's location changes, and the user could then set their timezone to that if they wanted.
• If the user ends up in a different country from their default location, we could assume that they are travelling, and try to provide helpful links to tourist information, local news, currency conversion, etc.
• ...?

Benefit to Fedora

Coolness

Dependencies

• GeoClue integration
• intlclock work

Contingency Plan

• This is an entirely new feature, so the contingency plan is just "don't add this functionality".

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