I asked this off topic in a different thread, but I guess it deserves a thread of its own:

One of my contacts already uses an N900, and I see his location as plain text in the XMPP status (which is a little annoying, actually; too long, usually irrelevant and changes too often when he's on the bus).

What I'd like to know is if the current XMPP-implementation in Fremantle also supports proper XEP-0080? Only this would allow to enrich the experience with applications like "beep if my friend is closer than 500m" or "drop call to girlfriend if wife approaches current location". (Parsing plain text for this won't work.)

Also, I'd like to ask a more general question about Maemo 5 in this context:
If XEP-0080 isn't supported... how easy/difficult would it be to implement it? I mean... the telepathy backend isn't closed AFAIK, but then you can't simply overwrite system components with you own variants without breaking SSU, can you?

Could you implement something like "the better XMPP" that co-exists with the standard implementation? Or would this break the whole messaging framework?

I think the reason for not using it is that most servers don't support passing it on/it's not enabled on them.

With that said, I'd like to see proper location reporting enabled, and I guess the server thing is chicken & egg, so why not start here?

I'm not sure about servers... I think they only need to support PEP in general, and this doesn't seem to be too uncommon.

Yes, it's a chicken egg thing (especially with clients), but OTOH, Empathy claims to have it, so I assume it's in telepathy-gabble as well... Which in turn means the implementation wouldn't be possible at a very low cost. You wouldn't even have to reflect it in the UI at first, just apply the settings to both ways of broadcasting location data.

A future version could then let me choose to only use XEP-0080 and not have my location written in plain text to the status line.

Again, the nicest thing about it wouldn't even be to have the structured data re-coded to readable text in the contacts UI itself. The really nice thing is how you could parse this data with applications other than contacts/chat.

Which brings me back to:
If Fremantle doesn't yet support it, and somebody wants to use it for a "drop call to girlfriend if wife approaches current location"-application, how would it be possible to add it to the existing messaging framework? I know it's possible to add a complete new protocol, but is there also a hook to add new capabilities to an existing protocol?

Agreed, I am currently writing a plugin for Emerillon to do just this, but currently, unfortunately using the text string rather than proper location lat/lon data.

Is there a bug about this somewhere?

In that case perhaps it wasn't supported by the Google servers. Something like that.

Couldn't find a bug containing XEP-0080; OTOH, I wouldn't file one as long as I don't have a confirmation that the existing backend really doesn't support it.

And yes, Google doesn't support it AFAIK. So what? It's just one server out of many.

And implementing it silently might not be a good idea. This has privacy issue, if people don't want to publish their location, it shouldn't be published behind their back.

Quite, it would need to be hooked into the current location questions about whether people want to publish their location.

I also wonder if this can be done on a per-user basis (i.e. so some of your contacts can see your location, and others can't, or see a less accurate version)?

I also couldn't see a bug, so someone do feel free to open one

I don't have a N900, but from what I see, it does broadcast your location anyway right now; therefore, I assume there's a setting somewhere that lets you turn this on or off - and maybe even fine-tune it (like publish only country/region/city). These settings would be used for XEP-0080, wouldn't they? There's nothing "silent" about it.


Still, my original question was if the current implementation on the N900 supports it... We're speculating here on why maybe not and what could or should be in a UI... But does anybody know for sure if they do or don't use it? Or at least provide a way for 3rd party apps to send XEP-0080 via the existing gabble backend?

No, they don't use it.

Someone more familiar with the telepathy stuff would have to say if it could be used though.