Kai, Kai Krueger wrote:
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.
I always viewed the Geofabrik extracts as a service to the community who build interesting things, or try out stuff - and who can also be counted on for a little bit of willingness to adapt to change, or add a little extra program to their toolchain if required.
You're making it sound as if the Geofabrik extracts are meanwhile a staple ingredient of consumer-facing services ("just download gpsmid here and get your data from Geofabrik and you're good to go") - consumers who need to have things served on a silver platter and who cannot be bothered to install software or convert files or something. I'm not entirely comfortable with that.
I think if you really are in a situation where you need a guaranteed 6 month notice period before anything changes, you should calculate some buffer on *your* side - e.g. you should definitely not assume that certain files will be at a certain place on a certain server all the time, but instead have some sort of directory that is under your control. You cannot burden Geofabrik - or any OSMer running something in his spare time - with keeping your application happy. Especially not if you only tell them about your application depending on them when they want to make a change!
Having said that, I won't switch off the bz2 stuff tomorrow but I certainly think that I'd prefer to use Geofabrik resources to produce more extracts for more people than to keep things running smoothly for end users of an application somewhere. The Geofabrik download stuff is primarily intended to be low-level - a building block for members of our community, not a shrink-wrapped service for the world.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
