[Photon] Considering Photon for production

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 12:00:17PM -0300, Alex de Oliveira wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I work at transportapi.com and we're considering replacing our Nominatim
> instance with Photon. Before making a decision, I'd need more visibility
> into the project possibilities so my company doesn't waste time.
> 
> Particularly, would the committers have time to review patches we could
> potentially send? For instance, a Github issue that interests us
> <https://github.com/komoot/photon/issues/198> is dead for 4 months now, so
> I'm not sure any patch would be reviewed at all.

photon is currently maintained by Peter from Graphopper and me. We
do aim to keep it running, provide regular extracts and look after
issues and PRs. However, we have both very little time at the moment
to spend on active development and very much welcome external
contributions. So while you'll certainly will find older open
issues which have been dormant for a long time, the PRs are
generally addressed.

> There are 2 things blocking us right now:
> 
> - BUG: being able to search something around a lat/lon.
> https://github.com/komoot/photon/issues/198#issuecomment-381603866
> describes it.

This is fixed in the recent 0.3.0 release. photon.komoot.de is simply not
running the latest version yet. Christoph from komoot may know more.
If you want to evaluate I strongly recommend that you get the latest
extract and try it out locally.

> - FEATURE: being able to return everything around a lat/lon without
> specifying a query e.g /api?lon=10&lat=52

We'd have to look at the specific use case to understand what to do
exactly here. You can open a feature requests where we can scope out
the feature and figure out what would be acceptable as a PR but
eventually you would very likely need to find resources to do the
actual implemention.

I hope that helps a bit for your evaluation.

Sarah