[OSM-dev] Will the real OpenStreetBugs stand up?

[Alex Barth]

Kai -

Thanks so much for the history lesson :) It provided exactly the context I was looking for. Sitting tight for TomH's push.

On Oct 9, 2012, at 5:58 PM, Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/09/2012 02:31 PM, Tom Hughes wrote:
>> On 09/10/12 21:24, Tom MacWright wrote:
>> 
>>>    All those are independent third party sites created by individuals
>>>    and are not directly related to core site.
>>> 
>>> Aren't they using the same database somehow?
>> 
>> No idea.
>> 
>>>    What we were talking about in the EWG meeting was adding a "bug"
>>>    reporting system to the main site that records things in the main
>>>    database and is integrated with the API etc.
>>> 
>>>    It is not directly related to any of the sites you mention.
>>> 
>>> Okay, then what is it? :) Is it not open-source at all? I thought that
>>> you were working on a branch of the 'official' OSB project and just
>>> needed to merge/publish that?
>> 
>> What part of "I will take an action to get something pushed out before
>> the next meeting" did you fail to understand yesterday?
>> 
>> The story is that Kai created something that was literally based on
>> taking one of the existing OSB systems and bolting that javascript onto
>> the rails code but it didn't produce a something that was very coherent
>> with the rest of the site and API so I have been reworking it.
> 
> Yes that is more or less correct.
> 
> OpenStreetBugs in one form or another has existed for a long time now already and has been a great resource to OSM. Imho one of its biggest shortcomings however is visability. I.e. too few people people know about and use OpenStreetBugs for it to fullfill its full potential. So people have been talking about integrating it into the openstreetmap.org project for nearly as long as OSB exists.
> 
> However, as too often in OSM, despite everyone seemingly agreeing that this should be a priority for some reason no one actually wrote any code for it.
> 
> I noticed at some point that the original author of OSB actually wrote a nicely encapsulated OpenLayers extension [1] to make it really easy for people to integrate the client side OSB functionality into new sites without having to "reinvent the wheel".
> 
> Given how easy it was to integrate OSB into a new page, how much people talked about the need for integrating this functionality into osm.org and that no one else had coded something up, I hacked together a proof of concept version in a few days in February 2010 and committed it to a branch of the rails port [2]. The javascript part was a thin glue layer around the existing OpenStreetBugs OpenLayers extension, while the backend was a re-implementation of the OSB database in rails.
> 
> Since then the backend side has been improved to be more in line with the API layout of the rails_port (although the original API remained to be compatible with the external OSB), but apart from a few tweeks, the javascript code remained the original OpenLayers extension.
> 
> The later part is (afaik) what Tom is objecting to and wants to rewrite it to be more in line with the rest of the javascript on osm.org and meet the maintainability standards of the code in rails_port. Also the currently publicly committed code on the OpenStreetBugs branch is still in rails 2 rather than rails 3.
> 
> It is the clean up and improvement of this branch that TomH has currently only locally as he hasn't gotten around to finishing it off in order to push it back to the public branch. Although quite a bit of the cleanup and review he has done on the branch (before the switch to rails3) has also already been committed.
> 
> So both the rails_port re-implementation and the original OSB code is available in public repositories, just that there are some as yet unpublished improvements that Tom has said we will try and get around to publishing till the next EWG meeting.
> 
> With respect to the relation to http://openstreetbugs.schokokeks.org/ and http://osmbugs.org/ it is meant to be a replacement for the two (which I do think are just two separate front-ends to the same bug database). It is supposed to replace them. Back in 2010/2011 when I last talked to the author of OSB, he was fine with the idea.
> 
> There were also thoughts of migrating/ importing the existing OSB database into the rails_port database and pointing the front-end on http://openstreetbugs.schokokeks.org/ to use the then new "official" osm.org rails_port database to make sure there wasn't any fragmentation of the bugs database.
> 
> I presume the authors of OSB would still be fine with this, although I don't know if or what plans Tom has for a transition period.
> 
> It at least partly depends on if the backend remains compatible with the original OSB API making it feasible to migrate the old db and use the frontend at http://openstreetbugs.schokokeks.org/ as a proxy.
> 
> Should e.g. the decision be made that one needs to login to ones OSM account in order to submit a bug / note then such a transition would obviously not be possible.
> 
> 
> I hope this makes it slightly clearer on the relation between the to be re-implemented rails_port notes (OSB) branch and the original sites and at what stage of development it currently is at.
> 
> Kai
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetBugs/New_Client
> [2] http://git.openstreetmap.org/rails.git/shortlog/refs/heads/openstreetbugs
> 
>> 
>> There is a branch out there that you may stumble across but it bears no
>> resemblence to the current code.
>> 
>> Now if you want me to get what I have cleaned up and published I should
>> probably stop writing emails about it and actually work on it instead...
>> 
>> Tom
>> 
> 
> 
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Alex Barth
http://twitter.com/lxbarth
tel (+1) 202 250 3633