[OSM-talk] Milestone

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Steve Chilton <S.L.Chilton at mdx.ac.uk> wrote:

> So, if anyone feels like getting their hands dirty and doing some collaborative work on mapnik style improvements then just drop me a line.

I've spent quite a while making maps based on the osm.xml file - not
just the cycle map, but others too - and it's a bit of a pain* to
maintain a fork or even just use the main one as a base to work from.
I wonder if making this easier will build more of a community around
the mapnik stylesheet and therefore get more things fed back in.

So what does everyone think about raising the minimum requirements to
mapnik + libxml xmparser support**? For the basics, that would allow
defining all the colours in one place at the top of the file (and only
use each hex code once***). Most of what I've seen people wanting to
do is fiddle with the colours and it's currently pretty hard to do,
and a pain to keep in sync.

Beyond that, we could look at splitting layers into separate files,
again for ease of following changes since diffs of large repetitive
files can be erratic (and editing too, I would suspect, since I often
lose track of whether I'm in the middle of a roads-casing or
minor-roads-fill stylename).

Thoughts?

Andy

* Understatement
** http://trac.mapnik.org/wiki/ManagingLargeXmlFiles
*** for example: "grep '809bc0' osm.xml | wc -l" alone gives 30 recurrences