[webapps] Denying geolocation permission doesn’t inform the requester of the denial

[Olivier Tilloy]

Since version 0.23+14.10.20140818-0ubuntu1 (more precisely, see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/webbrowser-app/trunk/revision/672), webapps delegate the geolocation permission prompt to the trust store. This is implemented by initially accepting the request to allow it to go through and actually query the location service.

If the user denies permission however, the location service doesn’t seem to inform oxide of the denial, and the page keeps waiting for a geolocation update until it eventually times out, instead of informing the user right away that geolocation is not available.

This can easily be tested by running the following on a device:

    webapp-container --desktop_file_hint=/usr/share/applications/webbrowser-app.desktop http://html5demos.com/geo

(make sure to wipe the trust store db in ~/.local/share/UbuntuLocationService/trust.db beforehand, to not use a cached answer).

I’m not sure whether the problem is in the location service itself, or in oxide.
Or is there a way for the webapp container to trigger and communicate with the trust store prompt?

[Thomas Voß (thomas-voss)]

The general flow of things is:

  webbrowser-app <-> qtlocation <-> Ubuntu backend <-> platform api <-> location service <-> trust store

The location service returns an error message if the user denied access, see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/location-service/trunk/view/head:/src/location_service/com/ubuntu/location/service/skeleton.cpp#L172. However, the error report is not correctly handed up the stack on the client side. With that, I marked qtubuntu-sensors as affected, too.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

Marking the oxide task as invalid for now. Please reopen if this is in error.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Marking the webbrowser-app task invalid too, as it appears the issue is contained in qtubuntu-sensors.
Once qtubuntu-sensors reports the denial correctly, oxide will pick it up, and webbrowser-app with it too.