[OSM-dev] Status of the Mapnik stylesheets

[Michal Migurski]

On Nov 14, 2012, at 3:57 AM, Paweł Paprota wrote:

> On 11/14/2012 12:04 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> 
>> Point 1 is purely a matter of taste; people are "just doing it" with
>> trac as well (and suffering from 2/3 there too).
> 
> Surely you cannot deny the fact that Github has extremely positive effects on development?
> 
> Why Trac has nowhere near such an effect I couldn't say but it is just the truth that once you put something on Github, people are *much* more likely to contribute.

[citation needed]


> With open source projects nowadays, having something in SVN and Trac is like putting it in the basement and waiting until someone asks to see your basement...

Github is undoubtedly awesome, but as you said elsewhere in this thread the real need is "also supporting contributors, tracking issues/pull requests there etc.," human needs that extend from community support rather than choice of technology platform. I imagine that if a proper study was done comparing Github at its current age to other systems at four years of development, there would be a similar proportion of abandoned or ignored projects on all of them. Github is new enough to benefit from the Hawthorne Effect, and maybe moving the OSM.xml stylesheet there would allow it to bask in some of that glow for a period of time.

The stylesheet is also an organically-grown system, and as Frederik pointed out it's not a good idea to just accept pull requests willy-nilly from anyone who wants to see their pet tag rendered. Not to mention the ease with which a punishing, unsustainable Postgres query might be introduced, or potential inconsistencies in osm2pgsql style column mappings across systems.

-mike.

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