>> - Am I correct in assuming that there are no general objections from >> the OSM server folks against such a dump? (Which would render the rest >> of this E-Mail useless ;-) > > the response has always been "if someone writes it, and it's good, > we'll run it" :-)
That's all I wanted to hear :) > (3) is the easiest to get done and most easily supported, in my opinion. Once more: That's all I wanted to hear! >> - Distribution of the data and storage space requirements > > i have a feeling that the data, while big, won't be so big that the > usual method of planet.osm.org + heanet mirror won't work. I'll have to rely on your word there but that sounds good too. One thing less to worry about. >> - Interval of dumps > > based on back-of-the envelope calculations, a full dump in planet > format would take something like 7-10 days to do in parallel with > normal server activity. so it couldn't be run every week and would > probably be cumbersome to do every month. in my opinion, we should be > looking at every 3-6 months. Sounds reasonable enough. I don't know how much demand there is for this data anyway. > note that brett has been working on option (2) by using osmosis to > dump very historical diffs going back to the inception of the > database. you can see the experimental results in > http://planet.openstreetmap.org/history/ > > for my money, if we do both (2) and (3), then we cater for all > consumers, and in a standard format. the output of the COPY command, > while good for backups, isn't really suited to dumping the information > that we have in the planet (given there will be edits by users who are > still not public, etc...) Indeed, (2) _and_ (3) would be the best solution! I had noticed the history diffs but didn't know their status. Thanks Brett for clarifying it! > if you want to get started hacking on planet.c then i'm happy to help. > otherwise i'm hoping to get around to it by the end of the month, but > there are never any guarantees ;-) The last time I've programmed in C is quite a while back (same goes for C++ which is used by the postgres part of the dump program if I'm not mistaken)...so I'll have a look at it but I'm more comfortable with Java (or Python, Erlang, Ruby, ...). So I'll see what I can do and inform you about my progress. The worst that can happen is that we have two working solutions for the same problem. Not too bad :) I had brief discussions with Brett about Osmosis and incorporating certain changes into it so I've spent quite some time in its source code. Having said that: I probably won't program this as a new task for Osmosis but as a standalone program as this probably won't be used widely and doesn't justify the extra work required to incorporate this into Osmosis. Thanks for your response. I'm hopeful now that this can be done! Lars _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
