[josm-dev] Changed presets, "contact"

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sat, 17 Dec 2011, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> There is a sad story behind this. From day one, presets were designed to be 
> distributed. It was never the plan to have one central set of presets that 
> the JOSM team would maintain and everyone would follow that. The idea was 
> that interested users could make their own presets, and share them with 
> others. "Look I've got this cool preset for waterway mapping, just add URL X 
> to your config and you can use that!"

Actually I think you mix up your timeline here. The external presets came 
much later, you can't really count the simple load a file method of early 
implementation, as only a few experts knew how to use this.

> That system was set up with the best intentions, and it continues to function 
> today - but nobody is actually interested in using it! Everybody just wants 
> the one, central, official group of presets and that's it. We do have a 
> handful of extra presets contributed by users but even those are hardly ever 
> used.

I would have already dropped a lot of internal preset parts and moved them 
to external presets, but I know what comments I would get from all 
sides when I really do that.

> This is sad; it would be so much better if there was a culture in OSM where 
> people would mix and match, where they would say "I think Pieren is a good 
> guy, therefore I'll use his presets, plus the special set of model airplane 
> tagging presets from user HobbyFlyer3000".
>
> But we can't do more than offer this - if people don't make use of it, then 
> what can we do?

The web-page sourced presets already improved the situation a lot. More 
and more presets and styles are showing up and are also modified and 
updated by others (and again one of the tasks I was blamed a lot for, 
even from your side).

What we can do is improve integration of this stuff in JOSM if we find 
ways to do so. It is still hidden too deep in the preferences.

Working together with the autors of other editors also would be a good 
idea, but until today all such tries failed miserably.

> Frederik

Maybe I'm a bit over-sensitive ATM, but on one hand you blame me that JOSM 
depends too much on the server information and on the other hand you 
praise exactly these feature and would like to have them extended?

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)