[OSM-dev] Compression types in PBF Format

[Matt Amos]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Stefan de Konink <stefan at konink.de> wrote:
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> Hi,
>
>
> Op 30-11-10 20:49, Frederik Ramm schreef:
>> Stefan de Konink wrote:
>>> This is the place for the 'too little, too late'. We are beyond the
>>> point of 'what' the bitstream should look like: you ought to handle
>>> what is defined now.
>>
>> This is not how we work in OSM. We don't have standards.
>
> For some reason we do, this is not a free form fight. And if we can
> change the API every week, I wonder why we are still at XML then.

because XML is a nearly human-readable, easy to explain and inspect
format. the same cannot be said of the PBF format, but then the
declared design goals of it were reduction in parsing time and file
size, not readability - and it achieves those goals superbly. however,
i think using it in the API wouldn't provide enough of a speedup,
limited by Amdahl's law, to offset the loss of those other benefits.

cheers,

matt