[OSM-talk] Standard map style contributions

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 29.12.2017 o 03:41, Andy Townsend pisze:
> Speaking entirely personally, the main issue is just selfishness/laziness.

I wouldn't name it "laziness" or "selfishness", just lack of motivation 
and I understand why - you have enough motivation to develop your own 
fork, so it seems to me that you have just different needs (but you 
still hint us how do you solve different problems, which is helping).

This is also a kind of problem which is hard to solve, because it's not 
clear to me what makes people do anything more than just opening a ticket.

> 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 .

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience! I have added this link to the 
OSM Carto Wiki page.

> 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.

Of course, but it doesn't sound to me as a major obstacle. I'm not even 
a coder in any language, all I can do is looking for analogies (with 
both CSS and SQL parts), testing in Kosmtik and asking if I don't 
understand something.

There are many "low-hanging fruits", which don't need any special 
skills, just playing with a code and communicating. There is also a 
demand for icons for different things and we look for people who can 
just use Inkscape, which means no coding at all.

> Another reason why I've not added more pull requests is that in some 
> cases I don't think that they'd be accepted.
>
> Another reason is I suspect the "jumping through hoops" needed to get 
> something accepted. 

> With the last two issues it's difficult to know what to suggest

Yes, it's hard to find a solution for such general issues. I still hope 
we could recognize some other problems, which are more "fixable".

> 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).

Thanks, Andy - that's exactly the kind of the input I expected: personal 
and detailed. I wait to hear more such real stories, even if they ended 
up with not even a single line of code.

-- 
"My method is uncertain/ It's a mess but it's working" [F. Apple]