ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan <krnekhelesh@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

As we all know, click packages will be confined for security measures.
Would the core apps such as clock, weather, rss reader and others also be
confined? In a way it can be assumed that the core apps are system
applications since they are planned to be available by default in the phone
images. This decision of whether they will be confined or not really
affects the implementation of certain features.

For instance, for the clock app, I would need to use tzdata to get timezone
information for different countries. This is necessary for implementing the
world clock feature. The world clock feature allows the user to add
different cities around the world to display the time in those cities. So
staying in the Netherlands, I would like to add New York, Delhi, Sydney to
know the time at those places. For this, I need to know the time difference
with respect to UTC along with the day light saving rules. This is also
precisely why I need to use tzdata. tzdata is being used by Ubuntu Desktop
to provide this exact feature.

I have been told several times that I should use the timezone feature
present in Qt. However to the best of my knowledge, timezone support *has
not *landed in Qt 5.1. And the clock app is fully QML + Javascript. Both
these languages provide almost no timezone ID support. Hence I am forced to
use online APIs to determine this info. Being a core app, I believe this
implementation is not reliable and needs to be fixed asap.

Other ideas such as maintaining my own timezone database which I ship with
the clock app package is not really viable either since gathering the time
difference info is not difficult, however taking into account the day light
saving rules at the correct place and date is almost impossible to
implement perfectly.

Any suggestions on how this can be done are welcome. I am hoping that the
security team can chime into this discussion to decide what can be done.

Cheers,
Nekhelesh
Clock App Dev