Proposing libchamplain as an external dependancy for GNOME 2.28



Hi,

I would like to propose libchamplain as an external dependency to GNOME
2.28.  If you never heard about this project, it is a Clutter based map
widget for your application.  It currently uses downloaded image tiles
as map data but there is a Google Summer of Code project to render the
tiles locally.  More information available at: 
http://projects.gnome.org/libchamplain

Libchamplain 0.3 (a development release) has just been released.  A 0.4
stable release will be made before or in sync with GNOME 2.28.
libchamplain follows Clutter numbering and API/ABI stability plan.
Since it is a young project, errors in the API are corrected in the next
even release until maturity is achieved and 1.0 is released.

Libchamplain would not introduce any new dependencies.  It currently
depends on Clutter 0.8 but will be ported to Clutter 1.0 as soon as it
is announced. Or depandancies include: libsoup(-gnome), cairo, sqlite
and Gtk+.  It doesn't depend on deprecated libraries for Gnome 3.0.

libchamplain already use a lot of the GNOME infrastructure: bugzilla,
mailing list, wiki and web hosting.  Migrating the git repository from
gitorious to git.gnome.org is planned. Releases are stored on
libchamplain.pierlux.com for now but it is also planned to move to
GNOME.

libchamplain is already used by an EOG-plugin to display where an image
has been taken.  There are pending branches for Empathy (being reviewed,
to be optionally available for 2.28) to display a map of where your
contacts are.  There is also an embryonic plug-in for F-Spot.  Other
non-GNOME applications are using it too but none have made releases
using it so far.

libchamplain has bindings for Perl, Python, C# and C++.  You can find
packages (or work has started) on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, ArchLinux,
RedHat and OpenSuse. There is a port to FreeBSD.

While libchamplain isn't integrated with any of the GNOME sub-projects,
it shouldn't feel alien to them either.  There is little i18n to be
done, no user documentation needed and I bugtriage myself.  There has
been some talk about A11y, but these plans will have to wait until the
SoC is over. Developer documentation is very important and that's why a
full API reference is available:
http://libchamplain.pierlux.com/doc/unstable/

libchamplain would contribute to improve the User Experience desired in
GNOME 3.0 by bringing blingy map information to the desktop.  Teamed
with GeoClue you get a geolocation framework to build tomorrow's
location aware applications.  7 SoC projects were submitted in regard to
geolocation in GNOME this year only (2 were accepted, 5 were releated
directly to libchamplain).

libchamplain is available under LGPL 2.1.

The project started in August 2008 and has enjoyed a nice growth since.
There is a good community starting to build on the IRC channel and we
can count 16 different contributors to the code. See
https://www.ohloh.net/p/libchamplain for more interesting stats.

In this email, I hope I made my case that libchamplain could be a nice
addition to the GNOME family.

Best Regards,

Pierre-Luc Beaudoin
Maintainer of libchamplain


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