[OSM-talk] Unclosed Mapnik bugs

[Jonathan Waller]

Hi,

I have been looking at the Mapnik bugs in trac and there are far too 
many unclosed and unacknowledged bugs.  In the last 4 months there have 
been 55 bugs reported and 5 have been closed.

For the 20 most recent bugs 2 have been closed (one without contact with 
a mapnik dev), 1 was reopened, 13 have only been touched by the opener, 
2 have "me too" comments added, 1 was moved by a member of a different 
team and the other had a comment which the submitter replied to which 
has been unanswered for 7 weeks.  The only mapnik developer doing 
anything was Ldp.

This clearly shows that we don't have enough people working on the 
mapnik component, which since it is the primary rendering for 
openstreetmap.org is a bad situation.  It is also off-putting for bug 
reporters since it takes a bit of effort to read the bug guidelines, 
create a good bug report etc. and then you are completely ignored.

Personally I would be willing to help with this a bit however I consider 
it to be daunting because it is very public.  Also since mapnik tries to 
create a clean rendering without becoming cluttered I am unsure about 
how good my judgement would be on which things should be rejected since 
what I want from a map is not representative of what the average osm 
user wants from their map.  In my view the maintainers of the mapnik 
style have a large amount of control as people want their changes to be 
visible, so concentrate their mapping on rendered elements.

Jonathan (quantumstate)