[OSM-dev] New OGR driver to read OpenStreetMap .osm / .pbf files

[Jochen Topf]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 09:24:03AM +0200, Even Rouault wrote:
> Le mardi 10 juillet 2012 22:13:15, Jochen Topf a écrit :
> > Interesting. Any reason you wrote the whole thing yourself instead of
> > basing it on the Osmium library? (wiki.osm.org/wiki/Osmium)
> 
> Hi Jochen,
> 
> The main reason is I didn't make an extensive search of what other libs 
> existed before, so yes perhaps, a bit of reinvented wheel syndrom...

:-)

> Looking a bit at Osmium documentation, which seems to be very elegant on a 
> architectural point of view, there are a few things that would have been worth 
> considering :
> - another dependency to add to the long list of dependencies of GDAL/OGR. I'm 
> not sure how extensively it is packaged for common distros.

Osmium is a header-only library, so the extra dependency would only be there
for people building GDAL/OGR, not people using the library. So I'd say it is
not that bad. (And you have the dependency on spatialite now which Osmium
wouldn't need.)

Packaging is a bit of a problem, I agree. There is an Osmium package in the
newest Ubuntu. But thats already out-of-date. We have a bit of a hen-egg-issue
here. I haven't focused on packaging because I didn't see the need. As far
as I know everybody using Osmium works from the git repository. But thats
certainly something we need to work on.

> - Osmium does not seem to be Windows ready according to its doc.

Yes. I hope somebody who knows anything about Windows development will help
with that at some point.

> - not a major point, but its licencing. I see it is LGPL, which is OK, but 
> more "demanding" than GDAL X/MIT, which can be a problem for some people.

If thats an actual problem for anybody (and not an imagined one) I am certainly
willing to talk about licenses.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298