[OSM-dev] Release openstreetmap-carto v2.25.0
Christoph Hormann
chris_hormann at gmx.de
Fri Dec 12 12:35:33 UTC 2014
On Thursday 11 December 2014, Andy Allan wrote:
>
> >From that it would be a reasonable conclusion to think that I'm
> > being
>
> a bottleneck on the development - well, perhaps I am.
I don't think there is a serious bottleneck in the merging of changes to
go active in the main map. The problem is not bandwidth but latency.
This might be to some part due to the order in which you work through
changes. You could try doing it the opposite way, working on the
oldest changes first. This would ensure things do not get stuck at the
bottom of the pile for a long time (there are quite a few pull requests
active at the moment for example that have been waiting for at least
the past three releases).
> So I pose a question that's most pressing on my mind - should the
> other maintainers be merging PRs without me reviewing them first?
> Will this lead to a better result?
Well - the job of the gatekeeper of the rolled out style is essentially
an administrative task and having an own opinion on styling is probaly
more a disadvantage for this. ;-)
Another side of the matter i already pointed out occasionally is that
everyone has specific priorities and no matter how well meaning you are
these go into decisions when making judgements about merging a change
or not. No matter how you put it the style still has a strong European
and even British focus which is an issue with OSM being an
international project IMO.
Mainly for these reasons i would much support opening up the active
style for more people to immediately commit to although i also see the
risk of a significant loss in style coherence and ultimately map
quality over time with that approach. The dominance of technical
considerations over design aspects and cartographical arguments is also
likely an issue. Having a two stage process with a separate map for
testing before deployment in the main map would really help here i
think.
The lack of a central test environment could be mitigated by trying to
get a larger number of people from different regions to test changes in
their local test environment on areas they are familiar with and weigh
in with their assessment of the changes. But people will only be
motivated to do this if they see their contributions have an effect.
And i would like to emphasize again the need for a more systematic
followup on rolled out changes - quite independent from the exact mode
of operation. For a developer it is always more interesting to work on
something new but it would be good to establish that the work on a
style change does not end with it being deployed.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
More information about the dev
mailing list