[FOSS-GPS] Re: FoxtrotGPS/libgps w/ fso-gpsd

[Timo Juhani Lindfors]

James Hiebert <james at hiebert.name> writes:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 08:47:16AM +0300, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote:
>> Would an alternative be to have ogpsd feed nmea or ubx to real gpsd?
>
> Well on my Freerunner, ogpsd gets UBX packets from the ogpsd.gpsdevice. 
> Seems like it'd be relatively straightforward to just pass them through, if
> esr-gpsd can consume them.

gpsd can consume UBX at least here yes.

> This seems like a bad idea, though.  I would assume that the gpsd
> layer is there for a reason... mostly so that the application can be
> insulated from gps and hardware specific issues.  Such an argument
> is addressed here:
> http://gpsd.berlios.de/faq.html#why_not_parse_nmea

I am not sure what you mean. Applications that use gpsd do not see UBX
even though gpsd reads UBX. They are insulated from hardware specific
details.

> http://gypsy.freedesktop.org/why-not-gpsd.html
> my understanding is that if we wrote a dbus interface for foxtrot, fox could
> just register for the signals and then sleep between updates, conserving the
> battery.

But is gypsy the right protocol? I understood that it was never in any
distro and its development has slowed down. On modern desktop
environments you nowadays see geoclue dbus api instead,

http://geoclue.freedesktop.org/