On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Roland Olbricht <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
No one is arguing against the use of XML for OSM data interchange. > On the other hand, what do you gain by not having XML planet files? 25 GB of > disk space? 25 GB of space is non-trivial, but neither is the space saved in transfer, which I believe is now ~5gb of space. That's also a huge burden removed from both the OSM infrastrure. > 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 This is a strawman argument because we're not talking about APIs but rather data formats, and in this case, the users of the planet files can easily run their data through Osmosis and get the same XML they're familiar with, so all your arguments about human readability and parseability are unaffected by this change- you simply need to run one additional command. > "One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any > external interfaces." This will have to be a whole other discussion- regarding the OSM 0.6 API, which is a public interface, but that's not what this discussion is. > 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. You can use Osmosis to do the conversion, so I don't see the problem in adding one additional step to your toolchain. - Serge _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
