[Merkaartor] [#788] Download more map data when moving map outside downloaded area

[Daniel van Gerpen]

Hi everybody,

Colin wrote:

>> When I move the map view outside of the downloaded area, Merkaartor could start getting more map data after a >> short idle time (about 1 sec). This should be restricted to rather high zooms, z15 and up maybe.
>> If this is considered too much automatism, an alternative would be a shortcut for "download map for current
>> view" - the dialog window you normally get should be disabled in that case. 

to which Chris replied:

> Mmm... Could you please explain the rationale of the request? Maybe propose this to the list
> first, that we can nget some feedback.

I discussed the exactly the same thing with a colleague this morning. He knows this
behaviour from podlatch and missed it when I urged him to test Merkaator.

The use case: Taking a long track while driving (car, bike) through areas that are only
partly mapped. Then scroll along the track to identify the regions that need more work
and edit it as you go.

Using the OSM tiles as background would already help here. Always importing the current
view only gets you so far, because currently you get more and more download layers.

In contrast podlatch just follows the area you are working in and forgets the old
region. And because every edit goes directly to the api, it does not have the
kind of edit history merkaator manages.

Up to now I never had any merge problems, but when constantly reloading map data, I
could imagine all sorts of funny situations there. Also, are the internal data
structures and algorithms prepared to deal with bigger amounts of map data?

Regards,
Daniel

PS: Are we at 0.10 or 0.0.10? CHANGELOG and AboutDialog say 0.10, debian/changelog
says 0.0.10. Website says 0.010 and 0.0.10. I'm confused :-)

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