Bug#195481: fragmented location info: hassle for users especially mobile ones
Package: general
Severity: wishlist
I'm not sure where to assign this, but ... there are too many packages
in Debian that ask for your location or variants thereof, all in an
uncoordinated fashion. To whit:
time zone
latitude/longitude (wmmoonclock, wmsun, various mapping programs)
nearest ICAO station (wmweather)
paper size a4 vs letter (papersize library, and a couple stragglers)
language (locale, and a couple stragglers)
country (something must request this I'll bet)
altitude (again I bet something uses this)
Right now, this stuff is easy to get inconsistent, and each one
requires effort to figure out. Some of them are even tricky to
change, or even to remember.
It would be nice if these would *ALL* assume default values given just
one, on both a global system-wide basis and over-ridable on a per-user
and per-session basis.
In other words, when I move my laptop I should be able to put in the
new lat/long and, assuming everything else is set up to default, all
these other things should be filled in with their most probably
values. Eg the nearest ICAO station, the most popular language in the
location I'm in, the size of paper they use there, etc.
Similarly, if I fill in just a country and it is a small country, and
I haven't filled in lat/long or anything else, everything should snap
to reasonable values. If that's not enough to figure out eg the time
zone, at least the timezone menu should start with a list of timezones
in that country. If I fill in a lat/long outside that country, it
should give me a warning. If I fill in a city it should take the
lat/long in the center of that city.
If some user fills in a different country & city, blam everything
should "just work" for that user.
I think this could be accomplished with appropriate debconf stuff and
a "location-related-query" executable that looks at global info,
per-user files in their home directory, and environment variables. Or
maybe a library, for easier retrofitting into little programs. With
some modular architecture so one can add new location-related values
which can be derived from lat/long/alt, and which therefore if filled
in can also be used to constrain this and therefore other derivable
values.
Reply to: