tangoGPS and good user experience

[Marcus Bauer]

On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:06:12 +0300
Timo Juhani Lindfors <timo.lindfors at iki.fi> wrote:

> Currently I only have a set of patches that add support for libgps.

tangoGPS has started with libgps and around version 0.7 switched away
due to too many bugs. What finally triggered the switch was the fact
that it didn't deliver the altitude due to a bug. As the most important
data of a GPS is position, speed and altitude I considered libgps
either unmaintained or with a massive lack of quality control.

What really counts is user experience and the maintainer of gpsd is
not willing to play with others. There is probably 4 or 5 major
projects using it and he didn't bother to communicate his API changes.

However great the new API may be, users of tangoGPS care about getting
the position - either it works or it does not. gpsd introduced breakage
for several downstream projects between 2.90 and 2.92. This was
announced in the man page...

All that counts for a tangoGPS user is to reliably get the position.
IMHO gpsd is much too erratic to support and one of the next releases
will allow direct access to the serial port too. The additional plus on
hardware like openmoko is that it saves another 50% of CPU when running
tangoGPS without gpsd, due to the inefficiency of gpsd.

That said, thanks for your bug report on the debian bugzilla because I
wasn't aware of it!

Marcus