Thanks for raising the question, Paul. First of all, I think it's important
to mention that this architecture improvement is aiming for complete
feature-parity and no impact on UX/UI.

> Currently Tilerator supports an arbitrary list of languages through a
> method that is fairly hacky. It has to use this method because the
> underlying tilelive source doesn't support an arbitrary list of fields.
> Tegola faces the same issue where you have to tell it in advance the list
> of field names, preventing support of arbitrary languages. How do you plan
> to resolve this?
>
You're right that we have a custom language fallback system, but it doesn't
happen in the vector-tile generation pipeline, but rather during the
rasterization
pipeline
<https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-services-kartotherian/blob/master/docs/diagrams/output/tileRequestDataFlow.png>
in kartotherian through a package called babel, which happens on the fly
during tile requests. This part of the infrastructure will not change in
this iteration.

We do want to explore client-side rendering using maplibre-gl (a fork of
mapbox-gl) and for that, we are currently exploring a solution
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Kartographer/+/663867>
where these custom fallbacks will be implemented in the Kartographer
extension.

I also want to acknowledge your concerns
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T270189#6764054> regarding maplibre-gl
lack of support for some language scripts and we plan to gather more data
and smoke tests to understand what to expect from client-side rendering in
terms of language coverage.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 6:59 PM Paul Norman <[email protected]> wrote:

> Currently Tilerator supports an arbitrary list of languages through a
> method that is fairly hacky. It has to use this method because the
> underlying tilelive source doesn't support an arbitrary list of fields.
>
> Tegola faces the same issue where you have to tell it in advance the list
> of field names, preventing support of arbitrary languages. How do you plan
> to resolve this?
> On 2021-03-22 10:10 a.m., Erica Litrenta wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> This is a follow up from our last email some months ago. You may already
> have seen today's announcement from Legal about the upcoming changes to the
> Maps Terms of Use. Here is an extra heads-up that Wikimedia Maps are
> transitioning towards a more modern architecture. The first phase of this
> transition will be replacing Tilerator [0] with Tegola [1] as our vector
> tile server. This is a change in the Maps infrastructure, so there should
> be little to no impact to the end users’ experience.
>
> It is important that we are able to provide software that is sustainable
> to support, before we can guarantee a reliable user experience. Wikimedia
> Maps aim to provide Wikimedia users a consistent experience contributing to
> and learning about geoinformation. To achieve this goal, we will empower
> those engineers maintaining the Wikimedia Maps infrastructure to do so with
> ease and low effort.
>
> If you want to learn more, please head to mediawiki.org [2], where you
> will also find a Questions & Answers section.
>
> Thanks, and take care,
>
> Erica Litrenta (on behalf of the Product Infrastructure team)
>
> [0] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps/Tilerator
>
> [1] https://tegola.io/
> [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Maps/2021_modernization_plan
>
> --
> ------------------------------
>
> Erica Litrenta (she/her)
>
> Manager, Community Relations Specialists
>
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Elitre_(WMF)>
>
>
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