Frederik Ramm wrote: > > Making the excerpts basically occupies a whole big machine for half a day. > It might be possible to do it on a weekly basis on > planet.openstreetmap.org (not my call though) but very unlikely to be run > daily. > Just to be clear, I'd like to say a huge thanks that Geofabrik has been offering the resources to provide these extracts and I am sure those resources are quite substantial. (Which is why they are so needed... ;-))
Imho, those extracts and their daily update cycle are one of the most important things to make OSM data accessible to a more general audience (i.e. not only companies that can afford 48Gb servers and the likes) and has enabled many usages that would not have been feasible with only the unwieldy 10 Gb planet files that osmf currently offer. Which is why I was a little alarmed at the prospect of them potentially "soon being removed" (or better to say changed in an incompatible way). Well, perhaps the ones that Cloudmade still offer are sufficient, but the daily updated ones from Geofabrik were just so much nicer. Frederik Ramm wrote: > > What's your use case for .osm.bz2 assuming that osm2pgsql, osmosis, and > mkgmap support the new format, and that anyone with Osmosis+Java installed > can produce a .osm file from a .osm.pbf in less time than it takes to > unpack an .osm.bz2 (and with 20% less data transfer volume)? > I think our toolchain is a little broader than just osm2pgsql, osmosis and mkgmap by now. The one I personally happen to know best is Osm2GpsMid. A converter to create offline vector data for java phones for usage with GpsMid. It is aimed at non tech-savy users. Even the current process is already often seen as too much of a hurdle. So either asking people to use a 10gb planet file or separately download osmosis, pipe everything through that and only then run osm2gpsmid isn't really an option. I do eventually, once I have time, intend to implement direct support for osm.pbf format, as by the sounds of it, it offers some substantial advantages, but it will take time. Furthermore, all the users then have to update. With the current version having been downloaded about 20.000 times that too will probably take some time. Similar things presumably apply to all the other consumer facing converters like the navit one, the one for gosmore, maperative, or any other programs that people use in order to do things with OSM data. They all currently take osm.bz2 country extracts and will first need to be adopted and secondly then updated versions have to be pushed out the the thousands of users that already use them today. Some of which might even be in software repositories. So one can expect that those update cycles are in the range of 6 - 12 month. So I would just like to see a proper "deprecation process" with ample of time to adjust and the appropriate wide announcements be followed that were discussed in respect to the gazetteer retirement to not have the same nasty surprises. Thanks, Kai Thanks, Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Release-candidate-for-OSM-binary-format-is-in-osmosis-trunk-tp5499747p5561065.html Sent from the Developer Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
