On 12/12/2014 16:32, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> No matter how you put it the style still has a strong European
> and even British focus which is an issue with OSM being an
> international project IMO.
And also focus toward major cities. There is an obvious fix - people
outside UK/Europe/major cities making PRs, submitting issues about
problems that nobody reported before and commenting on issue tracker
(it is much easier to change something as PR is active, useful
reports/comments are also helpful).
<flippant mode>
There's one obvious reason why people don't suggest changes - they'd
just get rejected (1).
</flippant mode>
The fact that changes that don't go in the general "direction of travel"
(2) of the style get rejected isn't a problem in itself - one map style
can't (to misquote the famous stage direction) "render everything louder
than everything else". That's why different maps for different purposes
have different styles (both inside and outside of OSM). It's clear that
the people working on the style have a "vision" of what the map should
be like (personally I'd suggest "one that looks nice at the expense of
some functionality (3)"), and that's a perfectly valid goal - but it's
not everybody's. It is, of course entirely understandable that people
who are contributing time and effort do so in a way that "scratches a
personal itch".
Personally I'd prefer it if the "direction of travel" of the style was
defined more clearly than in individual github comments, but it makes
sense that there is one - I don't believe that you can have a "good
design by committee" and even though I fundamentally disagree with the
logic behind #542 and #747 I agree that someone, somewhere has to make a
decision that "_this_ is the kind of map we're trying to be; _this_ is
the sort of information that we're trying to show and _these_ are the
places that it'll be useful".
So maybe what we need to do is "not start from here". It's already
easier than ever to set up a small tile server (4) - out of the box that
one's using osm-bright but other styles are available (5). TileMill's
crash course is pretty good (6), and it's even easier to not even bother
with that at all and just postprocess the data (7) and use some "good
enough" style. It's even fairly simple to plug your tiles into the OSM
website (8) if you want to do that. Someone somewhere may come up with
map style that works a really well with tea plantations in China -
people to whom that's useful should be able to use that. People who
want to contribute to and use openstreetmap-carto can do that too.
Rather than say "let everyone contribute to the standard map style" why
not say "let everyone create their own map style" - let a thousand
flowers bloom!
Cheers,
Andy Townsend
1) https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/641 , see
also discussion at
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/542#issuecomment-44789930
for the problem.
2) https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/747 and
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/765
3)
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/747#issuecomment-50230004
4)
http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-14-04/
5)
https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=project+extension%3Amml&type=Code&ref=searchresults
(stolen from a post of Zverik's on the Russian forum)
6) https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/crashcourse/introduction/
7) https://github.com/openstreetmap/osm2pgsql/blob/master/docs/lua.md
8)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Your_tiles_from_osm.org
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