Default App: GNOME Weather

[Jeremy Bicha]

As requested, I have (finally) opened the MIR for this as
https://launchpad.net/bugs/1707717

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 6:24 AM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> That could be a nice small one to add indeed, few comments/questions
>
> - is having more things using gjs going to make it more difficult to
> update mozjs/gjs for security reasons?

My opinion is no. We should not break core GNOME apps with mozjs
security updates regardless of whether they are in main or not.

I believe the actual parsing of web data for the forecasts is done by
libgweather (in main since before we had MIR bugs) which is written in
C and uses libsoup.

> - is gnome-weather detecting your current location or just using the
> configured timezone?

It has optional Automatic Location which uses the same Location
Services provided elsewhere in GNOME using geoclue. Location Services
can be turned on or off from GNOME Settings>Privacy>Location Services.
A prominent use of Location Services is the GNOME 3.24 Night Light
feature which can optionally use the detected location to enable Night
Light from around Sunset to Sunrise. geoclue does not use the timezone
at least if it's working right. My timezone is New York City but GNOME
detects my location currently for my general city in Florida.

One issue with GNOME Location is that there is currently no way to set
a different location system-wide. This is a problem for people who use
VPNs.

You can look at the weather for any (sort of) location in the world;
you don't have to use Automatic Location.

> - if it's guessing your location what service is it using and how
> accurate is it?

I don't think libgweather is very precise (although it works fine for
me). I believe I've heard of people getting the location for a city in
a neighboring country if the other city is fairly close, but that can
be fixed if people report it. libgweather is a bit undermaintained but
it did get a release in June.

Thanks,
Jeremy