[OSM-dev] renderd in a multi-user multi-style environment

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    for our German dev server, I want to give everyone who has an Unix 
account the opportunity to install as many Mapnik styles as they want, 
and make the rendered tiles available. I don't want everyone to run 
their own renderd though!

I'm prepared to code the necessary changes to renderd and mod_tile but 
would like to solicit your opinion before I do.

I think it could be feasible to have an /etc/renderd.d directory where 
you can put as many config snippets as you want, each representing a 
config section of the renderd.conf file, e.g. if you before had the section

[default]
max_zoom=18
URI=/osm/
XML=/etc/mapnik/osm.xml

then you would now have a file named /etc/renderd.d/default containing

max_zoom=18
URI=/osm/
XML=/etc/mapnik/osm.xml

We would then also need some way to make renderd re-read the config dir 
or a Mapnik config file so that the whole thing does not have to be 
restarted every time someone makes a change. The same is probably true 
for mod_tile which also reads the renderd.conf file.

Also, we currently have one global planet import timestamp file, but in 
a multi-style environment it is possible that some of them have their 
own little database and thus have their own timestamp. We should 
possibly specify the timestamp file in the renderd config so that this 
is catered for.

Anything stupid or unworkable in this? Better ideas?

Bye
Frederik