[OSM-dev] Osmosis Command Line Improvements

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> The biggest change is that all task names now have alternative 
> abbreviated names.  For example, --read-xml can be written as --rx.  The 
> short names are documented on the wiki page.
> 
> Another change is that some tasks can now accept un-named or "default" 
> arguments.  For example, the --read-xml task file argument doesn't need 
> the "file=" prefix.  Default arguments are identified on the wiki with 
> "(default)" after the argument name.

These make life much easier, thank you! We can soon start deleting all
sorts of perl scripts from the repository as they've been obsoleted by
osmosis. It seems that polygon extraction outperforms my perl
implementation by a factor of 5 to 10 which means that either yours is
excellent or mine was crap.

I'd like to ask for more default arguments. The "file" option in the
--bounding-polygon task and the "interval" option in --log-progress
seem obvious candidates to me.

Now the only remaining thing about osmosis that makes it somewhat
clumsy is that it talks too much. If something goes wrong, you get 20+
lines of error instead of one nice and concise message about what's
wrong. And even if nothing goes wrong, you need at least one -q if you
don't want to know what all those tasks are doing. But then again if
you deliberately want to see progress info and include -lp, this gets
eaten by -q. Sigh. Can't have it all I guess ;-)

Am I right in assuming that whenever you use output compression on a
multi-CPU machine, --buffer is a probably good thing to do?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'