On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 17:37 +0530, Debarshi Ray wrote:

Champlain recently got a Summer of Code student to work on getting the map rendered locally [1] (using OpenStreetMap xml data) as opposed to downloading the pre-rendered tiles as is currently being done. If it works out well, would it be a good idea to use it in our clock applet and timezone selection widgets?

Sure. I had put that idea here:

http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas

but it didn't fly, for some reason. Feel free to work on this if you want to do something cool.

Debarshi Ray wrote:

Champlain recently got a Summer of Code student to work on getting the map rendered locally [1] (using OpenStreetMap xml data) as opposed to downloading the pre-rendered tiles as is currently being done. If it works out well, would it be a good idea to use it in our clock applet and timezone selection widgets?

I imagine that even the raw shape data (for the whole world) is too huge for us to be able to package, so it would pretty much depend on being online, and so this would probably not be all that different for us than just using libchamplain with pre-rendered tiles now. (Meaning if you're excited about this, you can start hacking on it now without waiting for the new API. :-)

There's also another SoC happening this summer to add GeoClue support to various things in GNOME, including autoselecting a location in the clock. (GeoClue is a framework for aggregating location information from various sources--GPS peripherals, IP-to-location mapping services, wifi SSID to location mapping services, etc--and providing a best guess of the user's location to other services on the machine.) Confusingly though, this SoC is officially sponsored by the Linux Foundation, not GNOME--a wireless driver hacker proposed a SoC for "have NetworkManager use GeoClue to find the current location and tell the wireless driver, so the driver can use the correct range of radio frequencies according to local law", but the proposal that was eventually accepted involves more GNOME-side hacking than kernel-side (and is therefore being unofficially co-mentored by GNOME (specifically, me)).

-- Dan