Hi, without going into the finer details, I'd like to offer an outsider's view of OSM Carto development.
When Andy first created OSM Carto, he set out a road map that has long been superseded but thanks to version control we can still look at it: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/v1.0.0/README.md Essentially it was: v1.0 - re-implement existing stuff in carto v2.0 - make it more suitable for further development and customisation v3.0 - tackle the ticket backlog What has happened instead is that the easier-to-handle v2.0 was reasonably successful in attracting volunteers, and now we have a small team instead of one person doing the style, which is great. But after a while this small team has started milking the toolchain for all it's got, and meanwhile the SQL queries are so complex that they threaten to nullify any effort that has gone into making the style accessible to new participants (or people who want to customise it). So the ease of participating or customising has more or less already gone down the drain; what's still good about OSM Carto is that at least you can easily install it as-is on your own infrastructure (I regularly do that for business clients), but I fear it is only a matter of time until this aspect of usability, too, will be abandoned, and you will have to run massive pre-computation jobs in order to even get your map off the ground... Personally speaking, the OSM Carto map has been good enough for me and all my use cases for years now. If anything, I found the inflation of icons and special cases a bit irritating. I would love it if OSM Carto could be split into a "bread and butter" style that is easy to work with, easy on the eye and easy to render, and a "cartography navel-gazing" add-on where we show off how we can render different track patterns depending on the pebble size. We could then offer both on openstreetmap.org (where the bread-and-butter style would be the default). But I'm not involved in OSM Carto development and I won't tell people how to do their job. Occasionally when I look at OSM Carto tickets I am in awe about how much work goes into seemingly minor things - how details are diligently discussed, tried, tested, discarded, done differently, until they finally come to fruition in a release one year later. It is great to see this much work and enthusiasm invested in OSM Carto, and if the price for that is complicated SQL queries then so be it - the "bread and butter" style I was thinking of could be made by someone else too. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
