[OSM-talk] renaming rendering layers

[Ed Avis]

Andy Allan <gravitystorm <at> gmail.com> writes:

>>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.

Maybe so - I was trying to look at it from the point of view of someone who
knows nothing about technology - for them, 'Mapnik' is just a funny made-up
word and not really any better or worse than any other.
 
>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.

Interesting you should say that - but isn't it the case that in the OSM
bug-tracker, the category called 'mapnik' is not so much for bugs in that
program, but for changes to the style rules.

>And if we're aiming at anyone other than map-rendering-geeks,
>nobody really cares which library is used to render them

Indeed, and if they don't care, they wouldn't care either that the names
somehow match with map rendering programs.  Only people who know about such
things see it as a problem!

Don't get me wrong, I am not at all opposed to changing the name, and have
no strong opinion about which to pick; but from an end-user point of view
it hardly matters.  They are just random words.

>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.

I guess the 'default OSM style' needs its own catchy name.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>