[OSM-talk] Good use of time ...

[Lester Caine]

OK first call of the morning about the new front end ...

I'm expecting to spend a lot of time this week explaining things to people, but 
*I* don't have the information I need to do that! PLEASE can someone who 
understands all the ramifications of the new changes produce a help file to 
explain! I've explained already that none of my own crib sheets are now usable 
and I need to rewrite them, but can't do that without the current information. I 
ask again - what is 'export' intended to do?

Moving forward, I have a LOT of material in the todo file to be added to the map 
data, but very little spare time to do that work. The majority of my time over 
the last few years has been spent fire-fighting changes in the infrastructure to 
keep my end customers working. We now have to support windows from W2k to 8.1 
simply because there is no time to rework core software that is not longer 
supported by others, some of which will only work on W2k! Add to this all the 
'improvements' in the browser market, and all of the changes to PHP and things 
keep getting broken everywhere. Even Linux tools seem to get broken with every 
'improvement' ... anybody got used to gimp's redesign yet ... I KEEP trying to 
save images rather than now exporting them :(

This is why any changes to the infrastructure takes time to assimilate. The 
changes to 'style' applied to the OSM site still have not been reflected in the 
rest of the infrastructure yet. 'Id' still does not provide a suitable on-line 
facility for my usage, so JOSM is getting used more often, but is different 
again to the rest of the infrastructure changes. Asking us to 'contribute 
patches' to fix problems is a major headache where the infrastructure is using a 
less popular framework to start with. If we could get back to a much flatter 
playing field with fewer programming languages and variations on that, then 
perhaps everybody would be a lot more productive? I've had several attempts at 
working with elements of the OSM infrastructure but am currently stuck with an 
out of date slice of the planet file and code that will not run. So I'm reliant 
on the on-line services to do anything productive in OSM.

Please can we target some of the background services such as the management of 
start and end dates better in general so we can make some progress on providing 
OHM and develop a more coherent mechanism for handling 'archive' rather than 
simply deleting historic data. A large section of data that I've been compiling 
is start_date, but this is a little pointless where it is not being managed 
properly? Also *IS* there a consistent way of maintaining up to date local 
mirrors of the data? Working with 2 week old data is bad enough, and I'd like to 
be working with something closer to live then I can provide my own material, but 
until then I'm reliant on what overs are doing ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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