[Talk-us] Moving forward with the bot discussion

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 01:58:01 BST 2010


The other thread got a bit long, but I think we made a lot of
progress, so here's what I think we should do, and what I'm going to
do to support it:

1. We create some bot framework that we all like.

I have a start on that in Python that needs some polishing. I don't
want to blab about it because while the basics are there, it needs
work. If anyone wants to help, email me off the list and I'll tell you
where I'm thinking of taking it. If not, I'll work on it more after
I'm finished with the final edits to these talks to SOTM US.

I don't think this will be our one and only bot, but it'll be one we
can point to and use as a starting point at the very least.

2. Lets make it easy to spin up small instances of OSM, or instances
of small area of OSM.

I know there's docs on how to do this- from getting the rails code to
getting the database, and mapnik working. So lets make this process
easier and more straightforward.

I've started a project to use the configuration management system Chef
to build instances of OSM servers. So if someone knows the process of
building a small instance of OSM, and can walk me through each step,
we can probably automate the whole thing pretty easily.

3. Let's make a tool to make it easy to compare changes in OSM.

This would probably need to be a tool written from scratch, but
ideally a tool would report all the changes between two versions of
OSM (before-bot/import and after bot/import).

I imagine there'd be a mapping component to this (mapnik rendered maps
side by side or as layers on top of one another), a pretty printed XML
diff, and maybe some kind of tabular display of objects and values.

I can do some of this, but I'd love some help here.

4. We writeup some documentation on how to use all this, including the
excellent links from the other thread as a full "Guide to bois and
imports"

5. We present this to the imports list and maybe the OSMF and try to
incorporate this into some formal or semi-formal process.


The nice thing about this plan is that none of the pieces are
dependent on one another. We could do #1 and #2 without 3, or 3
without 4, etc.

But what do other folks think? I'm willing to do a lot of the work
here, but I'd like some help.

- Serge



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