[Openstreetmap] How should we draw and update the maps?

Matt Amos matt at matt-amos.uklinux.net
Tue Dec 7 19:10:24 GMT 2004


On Monday 06 December 2004 21:36, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Schuyler Erle]
> > Addendum: The NavSys MapEditor program is tres alpha, and made my
> > X11 crash *hard*. Recommend we look elsewhere, or (horrors) think
> > about building our own Free Software vector drawing app.
>
> If your X server crashes, it is a bug in your X server.  It might
> also be a bug in the application triggering the bug in your X
> server, but that is a different matter.  I am also unable to run
> mapeditor, and it crashes with some strange error.  I've emailed
> the author to ask about it.

it runs fine on my system (X.org 6.7.0, gentoo ppc). it does need a 
working RENDER extension on your X, so only fairly recent XFree86 or 
X.org will work.

> But I suspect we should look at existing GIS software packages. 
> I'm not sure if MapEditor is the correct approach, nor if writing
> our own vector drawing app is a useful exercise.
>
> Using qgis and grass with PostGIS might be a sensible approach.

qgis and grass seem to be really well-developed already, so it might 
be difficult to integrate extra functionality into them. qgis/grass 
also seem to be very "heavyweight" applications, which raises the 
barrier of entry to contributing to the project.

i'd prefer something more lightweight and directly targetted to the 
problem at hand.

on the other hand, i'm not averse to stealing some of their code if it 
helps ;-)

cya,

matt




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