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%

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".