[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/



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