[OSM-talk] Tiles at Home client update

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

 > But if it's the former, due to it being implemented now, instead of
 > sending it through a plenum session and 24 subcommitees, then just
 > remember : OSM isn't a Democratic project as in everybody has to sign
 > of on things implemented, it's more like an Anarchy with some
 > overseers.

And that's why some restraint is required of people with write access to 
SVN. I think that bezier curves are in general a nice thing to have. I 
haven't studied the aesthehic quality of the solution and have nothing 
to say about that; I guess it looks right.

But I dislike the way this was done. If you propose a solution and 
others say: "Wait, that might cause problems, let's do this another 
way", then you really should not simply go ahead with a "well this works 
and I don't care what the others say" attitude. If too many people do 
that, we'll one day have to drop the current policy that anyone can get 
write access to everything.

Sometimes, doing something in a quick and dirty way is good, "better 
than nothing". Sometimes it complicates searching for and implementing a 
good solution.

Jochen an 80n have been the major Osmarender contributors and both still 
feel responsible for it, it seems. You have put a post-processing step 
behind Osmarender's output which makes many assumptions about the 
structure of that output - assumptions that are in no way inherent to SVG.

For example:

* You assume that paths always have an id attribute of "way_..." or
   "area_..."
* You assume that XML tags for paths are always in one line and with
   the attributes ordered like this:
   <path id="..." d="...">

That's just what I saw from a quick look, but I believe there will be 
other things deeper down the logic path. Now, what you've done is you 
have basically put the resriction on Jochen and 80n to make sure they 
don't change Osmarender's output in a way that will break your curves
script (because, obviously, everyone would point their finger at them, 
not at you, if they released a new Osmarender that doesn't work with 
tiles at home) - even though until now, it was perfectly at their 
discretion how they name their paths and such. You are relying on 
certain internal workings of Osmarender without having explicitly said 
so, or having asked the Osmarender developers whether these internal 
workings can be taken for granted. (Or have you?)

Now this is all not a big deal, but something *did* go wrong here and it 
would be desirable to do it in a better way next time. If either of the 
Osmarender developers was ill-tempered, they'd just comment out the 
bezier stuff from tilesGen.pl and voila, we have a nice little edit war 
and can discuss about who started it...

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'