[OSM-talk] Tiles at Home client update
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sun Mar 4 19:20:22 GMT 2007
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'
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