Mozilla has announced that it will be disabling third party access to
the Mozilla Location Service June 12. This is used via geoclue-2.0 to
provide a variety of services across Debian desktops, in particular in
gnome-control-center.

GNOME has recently proposed a build option [1] to hide the
location-related settings in gnome-control-center. I'm told that
geoclue can also work with GPS so the settings might be useful for
people using Debian on mobile devices. However, I think we need to do
what's best for the vast majority of our users. I'm filing this issue
for awareness in case anyone wants to contribute alternate ways of
handling this situation upstream to GNOME.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2383

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

gnome-control-center 46.1 will be released in a few days with location
services disabled by default. Although Debian is not on an urgent
timeline (the next Debian Stable release is not until 2025), I intend
to keep location services disabled when I upload the new version to
Debian. That provides for more notice for people to adapt to the
change before Mozilla's deadline.

Please let me know if it would be better to keep location services
enabled a bit longer.

I provided a few more details at https://launchpad.net/bugs/2062178

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

Hi Jeremy,

Le 18/04/2024 à 14:55, Jeremy Bícha a écrit :

TBH I would prefer it if those services were kept enabled in Debian, as
those are useful to mobile users. Moreover, it seems an alternative to
MLS is being worked on, although I don't know what its current status
is, nor whether it'll be live before MLS goes down. But if it's ready
soon enough (that's a big "if", granted), then g-c-c will likely need a
small patch to switch to it, without user-visible disruption.

I understand the reasoning for Ubuntu with the LTS release approaching,
but I think Debian can keep those services enabled for a while and
revisit when approaching the deadline.

That being said, Mobian already ships a downstream version of g-c-c, so
it doesn't really change much to us: worst case, I can just re-enable
location services in our build.

Regards,
Arnaud