[OSM-dev] Compression types in PBF Format

[Stefan de Konink]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Tim Teulings wrote:

> Hallo!
>
>> Why this mentality? It is trivial to implement a decompression algorithm 
>> and some work better than others. Sounds like complaining about stuff you 
>> don't have to care about.
>
> I would not implement decompression myself, I have better things to do. Thus 
> I would a library for this. A library however is a dependency, that must be 
> build installed and delivered (not all the world runs Linux with smart 
> packaging systems) and licences have to be checked. It makes sense for teh 
> developer to try to reduce such dependencies by agreeing on one standard 
> compression format.

Since all program interfaces virtually equal gzip, and it gives perfect 
extendability. The choose for supporting the 3 most used compression 
schemes is perfectly sound.

Stop wining about code that either you do not write, or didn't care about 
before. There was this great moment when the bitstream was defined, and 
absolutely nobody cared until people started to write pbf code.


Stefan