[OSM-dev] Timestamp in PBF files

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

(message to dev list but explicitly Cc'ing Brett and Scott because I 
don't know if they follow dev)

    about a year ago, Marqqs tried to have a discussion on how to add 
timestamps to PBF files and hardly anyone was interested.

I've had a couple people ask me whether I could somehow add timestamp 
information to the PBF files that I produce for download.geofabrik.de so 
I'd be interested in solving this somehow.

I've found an experimental fork of OSM-binary by Dennis, here 
https://github.com/DennisOSRM/OSM-binary and used that to patch Osmosis 
("timestamp" branch on https://github.com/woodpeck/osmium) and Peter's 
osm history splitter ("timestamp" branch on 
https://github.com/woodpeck/osm-history-splitter) accordingly; this now 
allows me to produce OSM extracts with a time stamp - proto definition 
is here

https://github.com/DennisOSRM/OSM-binary/blob/master/src/osmformat.proto#L65

I don't have Osmosis support yet - I simply parse the state.txt file 
that Osmosis generates and use a command line switch of 
osm-history-splitter to inject that timestamp into the files that are 
created.

The files thus generated work ok with standard PBF processing tools, 
they simply ignore the time stamp. Marqqs' tools however expect the 
timestamp to be an ISO timestamp string, not a Unix epoch integer (see 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:PBF_Format#File_Timestamp.3F) so 
they are unhappy with it.

I really don't mind *how* it's done but I would really love to have one 
agreed way to place a timestamp in a PBF instead of everyone rolling 
their own.

What's the current status of this discussion? Is there already an 
approved way to deal with this?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"