[Tagging] In defence of OSM Carto (was: Re: Irrigation: ditches, canals and drains)

[Paul Allen]

On Fri, 31 May 2019 at 13:14, Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de> wrote:

the whole waterway line with stepping across zoom levels is full of
> fairly strange historic artefacts and not really well thought through.
> Combined with removing minor waterways from z13 waterways are quite a
> mess now.
>

You have my sympathies.  Fixing all of that sounds very hard.

However, given Andy's technique, I'm only asking you to fix a small part of
it.  The way
ditches are handled relative to streams and rivers may not be perfect, but
it's not obviously
wrong (to many consumers).  The way mill races and leats are treated as
full-blown
navigation canals (akin to rendering a ditch the same way as a river) is
obviously wrong
(to most data consumers).

I suspect that if you ever do fix all the the waterway code to be cleaner
and consistent at all
zoom levels, you'd still end up with mill races being handled identically
to ditches and drains.
In most (technical, not tagging) ways, a mill race/leat/whatever is a
subset of the class drain
anyway, it's just  a clarification of the purpose of the drain, in the same
way that tagging its use
as irrigation or flood control would be.

-- 
Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20190531/33a80fc0/attachment.html>