[OSM-dev] mod_tile stable version ?

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Wed Mar 27 17:33:19 UTC 2013


On 27 March 2013 14:09, Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> OSM data & tools are mostly developed by volunteers on their free
> time.

And I'm sure we all strive to make high-quality tools. If someone
encounters bugs, like crashes and broken documentation, then even just
being told by email is valuable, or logging tickets, or mentioning it
on IRC. There's no need to round on them for not having fixed all the
problems single-handedly.

Of course, some people have unreasonable expectations, and we all tire
of their demands. But things like being able to compile the software
is a perfectly reasonable expectation.

> Feel free to improve the wiki documentation if you find issues
> or incompleteness. Creating an account for wiki edition takes less
> time than writing your last 5 messages. Do something positive for the
> project instead of complaining. Thus, the next one installing a tile
> server on F18 will be grateful for your help.

And this is one of the reasons our documentation is such a mess. With
the best will in the world, someone who doesn't understand the
components and has just managed to get them working - for the very
first time - isn't in the best position to write clear documentation.

The osm2pgsql page on the wiki, like many others, is degrading over
the years as people add to it and nobody edits it. Such pages are not
converging towards "great documentation", they start off as useful
documentation and slowly degenerate, while accumulating increasing
amounts of cruft, inconsistencies and even inline-patches that you are
encouraged to apply. Sheesh. And that doesn't even count the
increasing numbers of other pages you can stumble across which
duplicate one another and confuse anyone who reads them.

So think twice before telling a new user that they should start
editing wiki pages.

Cheers,
Andy



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