[OSM-talk] renaming rendering layers

[Andy Allan]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:
> I think the names for tile choice are fine.  It's clearly impossible to give
> a verbal description of what each one looks like, so the only way to choose is
> to try them in turn.  The name is arbitrary and just needs to be short and
> memorable; 'Mapnik' and 'Osmarender' are not bad choices.

Personally I think they are terrible choices - like naming a painting
"E15A Camel hair" just because that's the brush you used to create it.

More importantly, it keeps causing confusion for the mapnik project -
getting bug reports saying things like "why doesn't the forest show up
on z6" - when it's nothing to do with the code of the rendering
library. And if we're aiming at anyone other than map-rendering-geeks,
nobody really cares which library is used to render them - and both
libraries are used by more maps than just the "mapnik" and
"osmarender" layer on osm.org

And on that point, the four maps should really be called "mapnik,
osmarender, mapnik, mapnik". Unfortunately naming them after the next
level up in the stack isn't much more helpful: "mod_tile, T at H,
some_ancient_mod_tile, something_proprietary"

I think they could do with better names, but especially in the case of
the mapnik layer it would be great to call it something other than
mapnik.

Cheers,
Andy