[OSM-dev] PBF HeaderBlock optional?

[Scott Crosby]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:08:41AM -0600, Scott Crosby wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Scott Crosby <scott at sacrosby.com> wrote:
>> > Yes. That is an osmosis bug. That header block is required.
>>
>> I would like to clarify this slightly. There must be an OSMHeader
>> block before the first OSMData block, however, the OSMHeader block
>> does not have to be the first block in the file. Also, parsers should
>> ignore fileblocks types that they do not understand.
>
> Hm. I see I have some more coding to do then... :-)

Sorry. I could have been more explicit. This is intended for forward
compatibility; anyone can define and add their own
application-specific block types to the file. It should be fairly easy
to skip those blocks; have a front-end filter that skips any block
thats not 'OSMHeader' or 'OSMData'. Then the first unskipped block
must contain an OSMHeader block.

>
> I am pretty happy at the moment though. My code that generates all the
> statistics for Taginfo (http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de) runs in about 2.5
> hours for the whole planet, thats less than half the time it needed when
> it was using the XML file format. PBF rocks!

Cool!

Scott