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
Scope
Test Plan
User Experience
Dependencies
- GeoClue integration
- intlclock work
Contingency Plan
- This is an entirely new feature, so the contingency plan is just "don't add this functionality".