GNOME's Geoclue 2.5 Brings Vala Support, WiFi Geolocation For City-Level Accuracy

GNOME's Geoclue library that provides a D-Bus service for location information based on GPS receivers, 3G modems, GeoIP, or even WiFi-based geolocation has been baking a lot of changes.

Geoclue 2.5 now relies upon WiFi-based geolocation when an application is seeking city-level accuracy, rather than GeoIP-based geolocation due to that IP-based location targeting sometimes being wildly inaccurate. But for this WiFi-based geolocation they are applying some scrambling to ensure it's at a broad city-level basis and not too centered on the user's precise location.

This D-Bus service also now relies upon the Meson build system with the Autotools system having been removed. The Geoclue 2.5 release also brings a Vala API and other improvements.

More details on Geoclue 2.5 via the GNOME announce list.