[OSM-dev] Reliability (was Re: New proposed directory layout for planet.openstreetmap.org)

[Roland Olbricht]

Dear Martijn,

There are much more tools around reading OSM files, in particular the XML 
format, than just Osmosis.

And even more important: It is easy to write a piece of software that reads 
XML, and that is _because_ XML is human readable. So you really shy off 
potential developers. It may be 20% or 80% of all potential developers; both 
are numbers to get frightened.

So I strongly oppose to remove any established format, in particular the OSM 
XML. I'm fine with the proposed directory structure.

On the other hand, what do you gain by not having XML planet files? 25 GB of 
disk space?

> Agreed, but most of what you would want to do with grep is possible
> with other tools like osmosis, osmconvert and osmfilter that work much
> faster on pbf and o5m files.

I think you miss the point. The argumentation "Don't continue an established 
toolchain when a fancy new one exists" is exactly what killed the Gnome 
project. Look for Linus Torwalds' reply in
https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8LKJk
The money quote is:

  "One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any
  external interfaces."

Transferred to our situation this means: we shall carry on the XML format 
forever because there are already a plenty of tools that rely on the XML 
format and they are worth protection, and because this is a clear signal to 
developers that we are a reliable partner.

To make it even clearer: being cut off the XML planet means that Overpass API 
will starve for some month until I have implemented the quite complex file 
format PBF, and with it some hundred frustrated users, just to mention one 
tool.

Do you seriously want to loose a huge part of the OSM community to save 25 GB 
of disk space?

Roland
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