[OSM-talk] Standard map style contributions

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/12/2017 10:45, Daniel Koć wrote:
>
> However after almost half a year we still don't have too many 
> contributions from other people and I'm curious what are the main 
> obstacles which prevent it and what else could we possibly change to 
> make it easier? There's also more basic question: how many people are 
> interested in contributing to osm-carto at all?

Speaking entirely personally, the main issue is just 
selfishness/laziness.  I don't use the OSM Carto style much myself 
(there'd be too much information missing at the zoom levels I typically 
use) so I wouldn't get much benefit myself from an accepted change.  In 
case it helps anyone who does want to contribute but doesn't quite know 
where to start I've added a diary entry 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/43041 that explains 
what I needed to do to submit 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2966 . There's 
actually a surprisingly large amount that needs to be done to support 
(in this case) 7 lines of changed code.

I'd also not assume that everyone is familar with CSS.  In addition, the 
somewhat arcane way that some of the selections for layers are done in 
project.mml is, shall we say, not always that easy to follow.

Another reason why I've not added more pull requests is that in some 
cases I don't think that they'd be accepted.  If I offered to "fix" the 
main problem described by 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/765 I'm 
pretty sure that it wouldn't be accepted.  As described in 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md 
, OSM Carto has somewhat conflicting goals - both as "an important 
feedback mechanism for mappers" and as an "exemplar stylesheet". Any map 
style will always be a compromise of course; you can't have "everything 
louder than everything else" which is why the requests for some features 
to be rendered will be denied (although I suspect that we underestimate 
how much more opportunity these is for rendering features at high zoom 
levels only).

Another reason is I suspect the "jumping through hoops" needed to get 
something accepted.  See for example the discussion on 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2355 - it's 
clear that there's unlikely to be complete agreement there, and the 
result is no solution at all (essentially "perfect is the enemy of good").

With the last two issues it's difficult to know what to suggest - there 
has to be an overall style "direction" otherwise you just end up with 
something that is a bit of a mess.  Likewise there have to be some 
standards, but sometimes I suspect that if the maintainers actually want 
to see a fix to a particular problem that they'll need help potential 
contributors a bit more.  Obviously the docker info is a step in the 
right direction (I've not tried that myself so I can't point to specific 
pitfalls there).

Anyway, I hope the above helps (and please understand that it's not 
meant as a criticism either of the style or the maintainers - it's just 
trying to provide answers to the questions that were asked).

Best Regards,

Andy