On Wednesday 10 December 2014, Matthijs Melissen wrote: > > Today, v2.25.0 of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet has been > released [...]
First of all these remarks don't have much to do with the changes of this release in particular, it is mostly that this has confirmed a number of observations i have made in the last months. It seems to me that with the more active development of the style in the past year or so with frequent changes with high visual impact the mode of development of the style as it is currently practiced has reached a limit where it becomes very difficult to develop well composed changes to the style at all. I am somewhat reluctant to bring up this problem since i think the more active development is a good thing in total and i don't want to badmouth this. I have not done a precise statistical analysis but the time for a change from being designed to actually being deployed is fairly long, usually there are at least 1-2 releases in between, often several months. This does not only mean changes need to be adapted to a changed codebase, it also means that the basis in terms of visual design is often changing significantly while a change is waiting to be merged. As a result most changes which are deployed in recent releases are not really very well aimed. They are meant to address certain issues but usually introduce at least as many new issues. Other changes are then made later to address some of these with a similar result. To some extent this is inevitable due to the complex interactions within the style but it is also largely a result of 'shooting at a moving target'. I don't have a real solution for this problem but there are a number of things that IMO could much improve the situation: (1) Systematic followups on the success and side effects of changes. The only case where i remember this happening is with the landcover labeling [1] but note that the majority of the issues pointed out there are not yet addressed now, two month later. IMO development ressources should in most cases focus on bringing a change to a satisfying overall conclusion before working on new changes. For most of the recent high impact changes this is not the case. (2) Stricter queuing of changes for deployment. The manner in which pull requests deemed ready for merging are selected for deployment seems quite random at least to the casual observer. Some are merged within days, others take several months (the oldest one currently seems to be from July [2]) Followups on previous changes should probably be given priority. (3) A test environment with worldwide data. I know this is not a new suggestion and mostly a problem of ressources. What would already help, especially for systematic followups on changes and would probably require much less ressources is a frozen tile cache that allows better before-after comparisons for changes already deployed. [1] https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/941#issuecomment-58766694 [2] https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/725 -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
