[OSM-talk] Unification of OpenStreetBugs an Trac

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Thu Nov 27 10:52:25 GMT 2008


Mikel wrote:
> I'd suggest bypassing Trac and looking into RedMine
> http://www.redmine.org/

I'm not sure why the need to reuse existing software at all. Bugtracking is
the sort of thing you expect to find in 'Rails For Dummies' as My First
Rails App - if you’ve got a decent framework it’s pretty elementary. (I'm
doing it right now for our work CMS. It’s not exactly taxing.) It would take
more time to integrate an existing set-up, let alone make it usable for
n00bs - which is, after all, the point of all this - than to write something
new.

But really, we have the chance to do something much better.

Right now we have three mainstream editors. On a scale of 0-10 where 0 is
"approachable" and 10 is "super-powerful", Potlatch is probably 5,
Merkaartor 8, JOSM 10. We don’t actually have an entry-level editor. Of
course there are things one can do to improve usability, and I'm hoping to
make Potlatch a 3 or 4 eventually, but to turn it into something really
approachable (like Google Map Maker) would basically mean we go from having
no entry-level editor to having no intermediate editor. Which isn't helpful.

So let's kill two birds with one stone. OSB + entry-level editing = OSM is
suddenly editable by the great unwashed.

If you're not logged in, you could:

- report bugs (OSB-style)

If you are logged in, you could:

- report bugs (OSB-style)
- place and tag POIs
- change way names/refs
- some other limited tagging (road type? oneway? access?)

No need to have geometry drawing, which is the hard bit to code. If you want
to draw ways, you need to make a sufficient commitment to the project to
learn an editor, just as thousands have already done. And if you’ve
progressed through this entry-level editor, you’re a lot less likely to foul
up when you do.

Some of this could be built on OpenLayers as per the data browser (though
Chris Schmidt has expressed reservations about JS performance with many ways
loaded in IE and FF2, and he knows much more about this sort of thing than I
do). Tom Carden’s very interesting-looking ActionScript 3 renderer
(http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/10/01/openstreetmap-vectors-flash-yahoo-maps/)
would be a fantastic foundation, unless there are already code gnomes
somewhere working on turning it into a Potlatch killer ;) .

cheers
Richard
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