[Tilesathome] New client version "Vizag"

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On 2010-06-21, Dirk-Lüder Kreie wrote:
> it's been quite a while since "Ulm" came out, and Sebastian and I
> decided it was time to put out a new version.

I have to admit that I was running the server in auto-plot mode for
quite some time, but it was very much fun to come back and work on the
server again. It has been amazingly stable without my involvement and
tinkering which is encouraging. I am glad that the .tileset file uploads
work so smoothly. The recent low zoom caption updates look nice and I am
informed by others that our internationalization is top-notch looking
(Indic fonts etc) when comparing to Mapnik.

On my personal list of things to do are some server back end things: 
- Implement proper OSM authentication with the osm infrastructure.
- Perhaps enable server support for partial tileset files to save
  some space (this would require touching scary C code in mod_tah, so I
  would appreciate help).
- Improve z6-z11 captions and probably nicer admin borders.
- Collect client errors and act upon them, eg. by optionally notifying
  the client owners ("inkscape binary not found" is an error which
  client owners might want to know about). Also collecting errors about
  "too complex tiles" would enable me to only hand out appropriate
  requests in the first place.

I bet there are tons of things that could be done on the client side as
well. I am still longing for a POI overlay layer, and I bet someone
would be interested in different language overlays). If someone would
work on or/p that would also be nice. 

- Things like don't crap out on "-90,0" nodes when rendering.
- Allowing for weighting when suppressing labels (e.g. now tiny
  Liechtenstein suppresses Austria and Switzerland in z4)
- Allowing the label suppressing code to work across rules and not only
  within one rule as now. (Capitals and non-capitals overlap now because
  we have no way of collectively suppress some of them).

Acknowledgements:
This is a very distributed work that is only possible because a few
people put in hard work:
deelkar codes the client, petschge takes care of tons of stuff, and
makes sure old tiles get re-requested, bobkare who we force into fixing
osmarender and t at h client stuff from time to time. Matthias Julius who
added the .tileset file support to the clients. The TRAPI people for
keeping their server up and running which is no grateful but a crucial
task. Mathieu Arnold for running the TRAPI load balancer, and Milenko and
Flohoff for keeping the servers running (did I forget someone?). Last
but not least for ETH for donating the T at H server and bandwidth that we
have used so far.

Sebastian
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