Dear Martijn, There are much more tools around reading OSM files, in particular the XML format, than just Osmosis.
And even more important: It is easy to write a piece of software that reads XML, and that is _because_ XML is human readable. So you really shy off potential developers. It may be 20% or 80% of all potential developers; both are numbers to get frightened. So I strongly oppose to remove any established format, in particular the OSM XML. I'm fine with the proposed directory structure. On the other hand, what do you gain by not having XML planet files? 25 GB of disk space? > Agreed, but most of what you would want to do with grep is possible > with other tools like osmosis, osmconvert and osmfilter that work much > faster on pbf and o5m files. I think you miss the point. The argumentation "Don't continue an established toolchain when a fancy new one exists" is exactly what killed the Gnome project. Look for Linus Torwalds' reply in https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8LKJk The money quote is: "One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces." Transferred to our situation this means: we shall carry on the XML format forever because there are already a plenty of tools that rely on the XML format and they are worth protection, and because this is a clear signal to developers that we are a reliable partner. To make it even clearer: being cut off the XML planet means that Overpass API will starve for some month until I have implemented the quite complex file format PBF, and with it some hundred frustrated users, just to mention one tool. Do you seriously want to loose a huge part of the OSM community to save 25 GB of disk space? Roland
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