[OSM-talk] Unclosed Mapnik bugs

[Josh Doe]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:42 AM, Jonathan Waller
<jonathanmarkwaller at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think part of the problem is the high barrier to entry for editing
the Mapnik style. I (and likely others) in the past have mentioned
that it might be worth transitioning the stylesheet to something like
Cascadenik or Carto so that those with CSS experience will find an
easier time editing the style. I especially like Carto because it
enables easy editing in TileMill, which itself is easy to setup with a
Debian package or even a virtual machine image in Windows. We could
even have someone setup a public-facing PostGIS database of a large
region so that there's no DB setup required for designers to get
started working. And while we're at it we should move the stylesheet
to Git. :)

For the Carto bit, there was a GSoC 2011 project for writing a Mapnik
XML to Carto generator, which "*almost* produces valid CSS for the
osm.xml":
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/mapnik-users/2011-August/004515.html
https://github.com/rundel/carto-parser

I think debates on Carto vs. Cascadenik vs. MapCSS vs. whatever should
occur in a separate thread.

-Josh