Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Nic Roets nro...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.com wrote: You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking of Merkaartor)!!?? What sort of crazy hosting costs $360 per month (asking Nic Roets)? I I said $12 a day for a server that can provide a decent routing service. (EC2 High Memory Instance). The kernel.org analogy is not really valid. They don't call themselves the wiki kernel. When I hack a kernel for an embedded project running on specialized hardware, they certainly are interested in my changes. By contrast, we will accept users who come in and make a few changes, spending as little as 10 minutes. are you saying that kernel.org can be unfriendly because the amount of effort put in by each contributor is higher? i don't think that's the right way to look at it - kernel.org doesn't need to showcase the capabilities of linux because there are many other providers and distributions doing this. the people who are using linux, for example on an android phone, don't need to know about kernel.org, and don't need to care. the people who are using ubuntu don't need to know about kernel.org, since ubuntu provides almost all of their needs. in my opinion it can be the same with osm.org - people can be using the data (for example, on bing, mapquest or cloudmade) without ever needing to see the osm.org site. those who are interested enough to want to contribute can do it directly through the provider, or be directed to osm.org. So we need to make the environment as friendly as possible. i wouldn't disagree with you there, and providing routing on the main page might make the experience slightly nicer, but it comes with a cost to OSM in terms of developing, integrating and running the service which is non-zero. anyone who's interested in getting a service on the front page has to make it as friendly as possible, not just to the users, but also to the admins. my suggestion for getting anything integrated with the main site is to set up a patched rails port* and your running service on dev.osm.org, announce it and keep it up to date for a while. when people have been using it, and it's clear that it's stable and what computational and admin requirements it has, it has a much higher chance of being integrated into the main page. cheers, matt * it has to be a rails port and not a static page. either integrating it into rails port is easy (in which case you can do it - it's easy) or it's hard (in which case there's a big barrier to getting it adopted, so you should do it to make it easier to integrate). ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Kai just showed me your demo running on dev, which is great - sorry I missed that. The data looks pretty up-to-date, is it being updated weekly or more often? Is it world-wide? Cheers, Matt On Sep 4, 2010 6:55 PM, Matt Amos zerebub...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Nic Roets nro...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:20 P... are you saying that kernel.org can be unfriendly because the amount of effort put in by each contributor is higher? i don't think that's the right way to look at it - kernel.org doesn't need to showcase the capabilities of linux because there are many other providers and distributions doing this. the people who are using linux, for example on an android phone, don't need to know about kernel.org, and don't need to care. the people who are using ubuntu don't need to know about kernel.org, since ubuntu provides almost all of their needs. in my opinion it can be the same with osm.org - people can be using the data (for example, on bing, mapquest or cloudmade) without ever needing to see the osm.org site. those who are interested enough to want to contribute can do it directly through the provider, or be directed to osm.org. So we need to make the environment as friendly as possible. i wouldn't disagree with you there, and providing routing on the main page might make the experience slightly nicer, but it comes with a cost to OSM in terms of developing, integrating and running the service which is non-zero. anyone who's interested in getting a service on the front page has to make it as friendly as possible, not just to the users, but also to the admins. my suggestion for getting anything integrated with the main site is to set up a patched rails port* and your running service on dev.osm.org, announce it and keep it up to date for a while. when people have been using it, and it's clear that it's stable and what computational and admin requirements it has, it has a much higher chance of being integrated into the main page. cheers, matt * it has to be a rails port and not a static page. either integrating it into rails port is easy (in which case you can do it - it's easy) or it's hard (in which case there's a big barrier to getting it adopted, so you should do it to make it easier to integrate). ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Now knowing that the gazetteer index hasn't been updated in 2 years and was considered internally deprecated, it means support for it was implemented in Merkaartor (and probably Marble) while the service was already dead but still accessible. I look at this situation as some miscommunication. It's not that the service was going away in a few weeks, but rather the problem was that the original service deprecation wasn't widely announced. I might suggest to OSMers who can make such decisions that services that are going away have a deprecation warning in them so that it's clear the service is going away. Imagine if every Merkaartor user who did a search received This service is depricated. Please use Nomimatim. in every search result. This surely would have triggered a bug report, if nothing else. - Serge - Serge ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Matt Amos zerebub...@gmail.com wrote: are you saying that kernel.org can be unfriendly because the amount of effort put in by each contributor is higher? Yes. Actually kernel.org is very friendly to there audience (Geeks). I'm thinking of someone like Richard Stallman who does not even surf the web. lwn.net/Articles/262570/ people can be using the data (for example, on bing, mapquest or cloudmade) without ever needing to see the osm.org site. those who are interested enough to want to contribute can do it directly through the provider, I'm willing to consider that model. From Wikipedia's experience we know that people are hesitant to contribute to anything with a corporate affiliation to it. (Why should I do anything more than report a bug ? They have so much money that their people can fix the data ) The other choice would be a second non-profit site. Kind of like Debian is to kernel.org. The site would try to capture it's own donations. So it would limit the number of links to osm.org e.g. by embedding Potlatch. And it would not want to spend money on development, so it would copy large parts of osm.org. So it will be just a few steps away from becoming an outright fork... (Banish the thought). Kai just showed me your demo running on dev, which is great - sorry I missed that. The data looks pretty up-to-date, is it being updated weekly or more often? Is it world-wide? Daily worldwide updates since July 19. The 3 major things that surfaced / resurfaced were : 1. Gosmore did not handle access=yes correctly, but it's patched now. 2. Motorcars on tracks. 3. Connecting high speed bidirectional roads to the network. If anyone don't know what 2 3 are about, please ask me, or ask the routing list. * it has to be a rails port and not a static page. ... Thanks for the guidelines. Serge wrote Imagine if every Merkaartor user who did a search received This service is depricated. Please use Nomimatim. Good advice. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Hi, Nic Roets wrote: From Wikipedia's experience we know that people are hesitant to contribute to anything with a corporate affiliation to it. (Why should I do anything more than report a bug ? They have so much money that their people can fix the data ) I would love that to be true but the popularity of Google Map Maker seems to prove otherwise. On the whole, I don't think people even care. The other choice would be a second non-profit site. Kind of like Debian is to kernel.org. The site would try to capture it's own donations. So it would limit the number of links to osm.org e.g. by embedding Potlatch. And it would not want to spend money on development, so it would copy large parts of osm.org. So it will be just a few steps away from becoming an outright fork... I don't see a problem with there being such a site. I'd request that they make clear that they are not OSM, and do not own OSM, but I think Debian does that pretty well with regard to Linux. (Ideally, I'd love there to be a handful such sites, just as there's a handful of good Linux distributions, each catering to the whims of a different audience.) 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
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: Hi, Nic Roets wrote: From Wikipedia's experience we know that people are hesitant to contribute to anything with a corporate affiliation to it. (Why should I do anything more than report a bug ? They have so much money that their people can fix the data ) I would love that to be true but the popularity of Google Map Maker seems to prove otherwise. On the whole, I don't think people even care. I think many people are not yet seeing Google as a large, greedy corporate. Party because the only people who are paying Google any money are the people who advertise with them. And if you take the number of MM users as a percentage of the number of Google Maps users, I think it will be tiny. Only people who are genuinely annoyed with problems in Google Maps are contributing. But after doing a few searches like [1], I think we are still ahead of them. And as we gain market share in the online maps arena, we will steal MM contributors. I myself was contributing to Google Earth and Track4Africa* before I started contributing to OSM. [1] http://www.google.com/search?q=google+map+maker+OR+openstreetmap * They are currently one of the Google Maps sources for African countries. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.comwrote: You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking of Merkaartor)!!?? What sort of crazy hosting costs $360 per month (asking Nic Roets)? I I said $12 a day for a server that can provide a decent routing service. (EC2 High Memory Instance). The kernel.org analogy is not really valid. They don't call themselves the wiki kernel. When I hack a kernel for an embedded project running on specialized hardware, they certainly are interested in my changes. By contrast, we will accept users who come in and make a few changes, spending as little as 10 minutes. So we need to make the environment as friendly as possible. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 15:54, Jonathan Bennett openstreet...@jonno.cix.co.uk wrote: On 01/09/2010 22:33, Chris Browet wrote: For myself: - Considering the reactions, maybe avoid as much as possible to use openstreetmap.org http://openstreetmap.org services, but anyway be sure it fails gracefully. Chris, If you're talking in your role as a maintainer of Merkaartor, then the fails gracefully bit is a good idea, but you don't need to avoid using the services. Mappers editing the data are the intended audience for the services on openstreetmap.org, so Merkaartor is meant to be using them. Thanks for confirming this. However, the original problem is the same, be it Merkaartor or a third-party. If the OSM services can disappear in a snap, it's no real fun for me to develop support for it nor for the end-users to be confronted to an non-working functionality... But If everyone agrees that an announcement of ~3 months should be foresee before a service termination (time to fix and deploy a new version, and some time for the new version to propagate), it's OK for me. - Chris - - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 13:26, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. Come on. Does that mean that we cannot use www.openstreetmap.org/api to update the database? Well, in the context of stable OS releases that distribute programs like Merkaartor the API is pretty much *guaranteed* to break. An Ubuntu LTS release is 5 years, Red Hat and Debian have something similar. That's a lot less time than the entire 0.5 - 0.6 transition took. Didn't we have existing packaged programs that used 0.5 break for this exact reason when we switched to 0.6? If not we're certain to have it if we ever switch to 0.7, depending on the nature of the API changes. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 16:24, Emilie Laffray emilie.laff...@gmail.comwrote: On 2 September 2010 15:20, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: Thanks for confirming this. However, the original problem is the same, be it Merkaartor or a third-party. If the OSM services can disappear in a snap, it's no real fun for me to develop support for it nor for the end-users to be confronted to an non-working functionality... But If everyone agrees that an announcement of ~3 months should be foresee before a service termination (time to fix and deploy a new version, and some time for the new version to propagate), it's OK for me. I think it is safe to say we went a bit fast. Next time, we will be more careful in announcing it properly long enough in advance. So you think that a period of 3 months is good enough? Anyway, we will try to make sure that this doesn't happen in the same way. Thanks for this. On a reversed point-of-view, it might also be a good idea to pull the plug sooner to clinically dead services. Now knowing that the gazetteer index hasn't been updated in 2 years and was considered internally deprecated, it means support for it was implemented in Merkaartor (and probably Marble) while the service was already dead but still accessible. Best Regards - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 15:00, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 16:39, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason ava...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 13:26, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. Come on. Does that mean that we cannot use www.openstreetmap.org/api to update the database? Well, in the context of stable OS releases that distribute programs like Merkaartor the API is pretty much *guaranteed* to break. An Ubuntu LTS release is 5 years, Red Hat and Debian have something similar. That's a lot less time than the entire 0.5 - 0.6 transition took. Sure, but again, LTS is for business, and I don't see a business using Merkaartor ;-) And the 0.5 - 0.6 was announced, what, 6 months in advance? With discussions and plannification over 1 year... It really doesn't matter in this context how long it was planned for. With API 0.6 we didn't have full editor support until relatively shortly before the deployment (actually only proper support long after that). Any distro that took a snapshot of an OSM editor a few months before the switchover for its stable release would have ended up with an editor that didn't work anymore. As long as our API transitions are shorter than major distro releases (i.e. shorter than 6months - 2 years or so) this sort of thing is bound to happen. But there's ways to mitigate that, from an earlier E-Mail you wrote: Now, name search on 0.16.x which is going to be included in the newest Fedora and Debian won't work :-( Have you tried to contact upstream about this? This sounds like something that they'd be willing to patch even in a stable release. It's a very important feature (in a relatively unimportant[1]. program) that won't work *at all*. Aren't they willing to patch that? You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking of Merkaartor)!!?? What sort of crazy hosting costs $360 per month (asking Nic Roets)? I bet you could host basic redirection services on a 512 Linode for $20/month. Possibly even a whole nominatim instance (I don't know its resource demands). Anyway, just pointing the service to your own domain costs next to nothing. And that seems like a very basic precaution that programs like Merkaartor should take so they can deal with cases like these. Have fun. 1. Unimportant in the context of the OS, i.e. it's not like Merkaartor is glibc here ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Now, name search on 0.16.x which is going to be included in the newest Fedora and Debian won't work :-( Have you tried to contact upstream about this? This sounds like something that they'd be willing to patch even in a stable release. It's a very important feature (in a relatively unimportant[1]. program) that won't work *at all*. Aren't they willing to patch that? They are very nice people, and I'm sure they would do all they can to sneak a patch in, but I'm not keen myself in rushing a point release... You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking of Merkaartor)!!?? What sort of crazy hosting costs $360 per month (asking Nic Roets)? I bet you could host basic redirection services on a 512 Linode for $20/month. Possibly even a whole nominatim instance (I don't know its resource demands). Anyway, just pointing the service to your own domain costs next to Err, yes, it would be cheap. But managing/supporting/updating the service behind it is totally out of scope of Merkaartor. nothing. And that seems like a very basic precaution that programs like Merkaartor should take so they can deal with cases like these. I won't discuss this any further, but I still think it is nonsense in the context of an OSM editor like Merkaartor. Pushing the reasoning, I could as well have my own copy of the OSM database and push data patches to the main database... Mmm... Now that I think about it, it would actually be the thing to do in the context of the OSM is all about data concept, but it is hardly practical, resource-wise. Regards - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Is there a low traffic OSM announcement list that provides announcements like these for people who rely on OpenStreetMap services? there is an announce list, but for development announcements like this one, this dev list is the best place. Well, I just browsed through the announce list and to be honest I think the deprecation of a public API really should have been announced there a year ago if it was already obvious that it would get discontinued. Personally I'd say it should be good practice to announce the deprecation half a year before shutdown of the service on osm-announce. I'm afraid I must agree on that (at least 3 months, I'd say, not 2 weeks for sure) Merkaartor was using gazetteer for 1+ year and I only learned of it being closed down by casually browsing the dev list. Now, name search on 0.16.x which is going to be included in the newest Fedora and Debian won't work :-( As far as I'm concerned, I even didn't know about nominatim, nor the fact that gazetteer was so behind on updates. I'm afraid there is a communication channel missing somewhere... - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. Come on. Does that mean that we cannot use www.openstreetmap.org/api to update the database? That tile.openstreetmap.org can disappear in 2 weeks time? While I agree it shouldn't be hardcoded, I don't see right now how to make a difference between a not supported/endorsed/can disappear anytime openstreetmap.org service and stable ones... ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Hi, First of all I'd like to say thanks to Grant for providing a solution so quickly. :-) Am Dienstag, 31. August 2010 12:44:54 schrieb Andy Allan: Secondly, remember that we're an open-source, volunteer project kind of thing, so have appropriate expectations! If the server had stopped working and nobody was interested in fixing it, then you'd have had zero notice. That is pretty clear to me :-) However as a KDE developer I'm in the Free Software business since more than 12 years now. Of course the very same does apply to KDE or Marble (Which is Free Software as well): We do all the development in our spare time. And yes we could just do libraries without an API promise and without a promise that any software we produce will ever become stable. For stable versions of Linux we could just point you to companies who would customize a special stable version from KDE trunk and all the other linux software places. However that is of course not how it works. And I doubt that OSM contributors see openstreetmap.org as a nice limited Demo Version of what a true Free Mapping portal could look like. In Free Software projects - inspite of the fact that we do stuff in our spare time - we still aim for being able to give guarantees. For the same reason that people work on OSM: We want our stuff we work on to be successful. So in Open Source projects we usually give several kinds of guarantees: Like * API guarantees * Binary Compatibility guarantees * The outlook that there will be a next stable version * The promise that security fixes will go into the next version. Of course all this only can be made once projects have grown enough so that such guarantees can be made. I think that OSM is already mature enough that such commitments can be introduced. And I think that something like this could easily be communicated via properly announced channels. OSM already kind of provides such a guarantee implicitely for the tile Urls (at least we discussed this topic at the SOTM2008 already). It would be nice if this was formally publicized somewhere and extended for other services. So yes, I fully understand that this is not in place yet. And I fully understand why (hey, Marble development processes aren't all rosy either ;-) But I think there should be an aim to introduce some place where I can look up which services/Urls etc. are considered stable and supported and which are considered experimental or deprecated. And I think that it should be the aim of OSM to have a proper deprecation process. :-) On the other hand, if you have someone who's interested in running the namefinder service, and have the hardware and hosting to do so, then you have more than the OSM project has on all counts and that would be great! Yes, sure, that's why we do already have some map material stored on the KDE servers. But you might see why this is a bit problematic for the kinds of services and data that openstreetmap.org hosts. The OSM project doesn't run high-availability APIs - there's no guarantees, and certainly not any kind of availability guarantee when we no longer maintain something that we used to. If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. It's bad practise - see Yes, that is true. Since the server address is stored inside a xml file it shouldn't be too hard to check for a more recent version on usage and use that one if available. I had such plans at one point but so far it never got implemented. And thanks a lot for the great work you guys are doing :-) Best Regards, Torsten ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 15:49, Patrick Kilian o...@petschge.de wrote: Hi, If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org http://openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. Come on. Does that mean that we cannot use www.openstreetmap.org/api http://www.openstreetmap.org/api to update the database? This one might be ok. Iff you make your users sign up for OSM and have them read and understand the limits e.g. on acceptable sources. That tile.openstreetmap.org http://tile.openstreetmap.org can disappear in 2 weeks time? Very unlikely. But it might if the hardware catches on fire. And you should definitely NOT hardcode that URL into your application. The application should talk to your server(s) only. In the start you could redirect or proxy the request on your server. If later you app is used by 1 million users you can run your own tileserver under that URL. And once you reach 2 billion users you can run a load balance there. All without changing a single rolled-out copy of your app, just by reconfiguring a single point - your server. And if the OSM hardware ever burns down you can still feed you application from your proxy or even start to render from the last saved planet dump. While I'd completely agree in a business world, don't forget we are FLOSS developers working on software in our free time. We don't (at least I don't, and I doubt Marble has) have a server. OSMF do. Just put a big red sticker on the wiki saying ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE OUR WEB SERVICES, SETUP YOUR OWN!, then... - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Torsten Rahn tac...@t-online.de wrote: But I think there should be an aim to introduce some place where I can look up which services/Urls etc. are considered stable and supported and which are considered experimental or deprecated. And I think that it should be the aim of OSM to have a proper deprecation process. :-) I don't think OSM provides any services that the public should consider stable in the sense of 99.999% uptime, transaction guaranteed or your money back. The closest might be the API server, but even that could possibly go down as has been described before. OSM is about the data itself, not the services around it. The services available on the website and wiki are there because someone thought it would be a nice way to help debug or otherwise improve mapping and map data quality, not to provide a service to external users like KDE, Microsoft, Google or anyone for that matter. The bottom line is: if you want a stable service, run it yourself. That's why the data is under a relatively free and open license. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Hi, I don't think OSM provides any services that the public should consider stable in the sense of 99.999% uptime, transaction guaranteed or your money back. The closest might be the API server, but even that could possibly go down as has been described before. I'm NOT talking about a 99,9%-I'll sue you if you don't deliver-guarantee. I know that this is not possible to deliver for an open source project. What I am talking about was _the aim_ and _the strong intention_ of keeping a certain API and service up and running for a time that you commit to. I know that there can be power outages, lack of manpower or whatever obstacle. That is all understandable and natural. The only thing that I'm asking for and that I think should be easily deliverable is the communicated intention of keeping APIs stable for a communicated amount of time. And that there is a communication channel that I can subscribe to that informs me about deprecation of APIs soon enough before. When I release a stable version of Marble I give no guarantee that running this version of Marble will not toast your cat. I'm also not giving any guarantee that it wouldn't crash. But by releasing a stable version of Marble I publically announce: here is something that you can use with least danger of crashes. I did my best to prevent crashes and I will surely do my best to keep APIs stable. That kind of commitment is what I'm asking for. Nothing more. OSM is about the data itself, not the services around it. The services available on the website and wiki are there because someone thought it would be a nice way to help debug or otherwise improve mapping and map data quality, not to provide a service to external users like KDE, Microsoft, Google or anyone for that matter. I could exchange data for Free Software and it's clear that OpenStreetMap's position is not at all different from the one of any other Open Source project. The bottom line is: if you want a stable service, run it yourself. That's why the data is under a relatively free and open license. With the same attitude I could say: You want a stable KDE or Marble release? Check out a development version of the software, compile it and make it stable yourself! Works nicely in theory Best Regards, Torsten ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: While I'd completely agree in a business world, don't forget we are FLOSS developers working on software in our free time. We don't (at least I don't, and I doubt Marble has) have a server. OSMF do. Just put a big red sticker on the wiki saying ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE OUR WEB SERVICES, SETUP YOUR OWN!, then... Just because OSMF, KDE and all the little projects are a non-profit, does not mean they cannot raise money. Last time OSMF raised money for hardware, the target was reached in 2 days. And it makes sense to have a few central servers serving many projects. Not only does it simplify things like applying patches and performance tuning, but the planet diffs also has a certain amount of fixed processing to them. All you do is form an association and pool the donations you receive. And we know that the service will not be swamped overnight by Google users or some other large site. Those large commercial companies have high standards, even for their free products. Our data is not good enough and they will loose too many users if the site gets overloaded. And while this discussion has been about searching (geocoding) it also applies to routing. For $12 a day you can rent a pretty nice server. ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Am Mittwoch, 1. September 2010 17:02:40 schrieb Chris Browet: On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 16:25, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Torsten Rahn tac...@t-online.de wrote: In our free and open world, I think stable is not about uptime but about perennity, i.e., even if the server crashes, it will be there again, be it in 1 day, 1 week or 1 month. Not even to OSM data editors? For whom, then? Why even announce that gazetteer was going down... Remember the thread is not about the quality of the services provided by OSMF, just that the notice was too short... If some services are just sandboxes and not meant to be used, please make it clear, and this is what Torsten means by [a place to] look up which services/Urls etc. are considered stable and supported and which are considered experimental or deprecated, I think. Exactly. That's all I'm asking for :-) Best Regards, Torsten ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 17:18, Nic Roets nro...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: While I'd completely agree in a business world, don't forget we are FLOSS developers working on software in our free time. We don't (at least I don't, and I doubt Marble has) have a server. OSMF do. Just put a big red sticker on the wiki saying ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE OUR WEB SERVICES, SETUP YOUR OWN!, then... Just because OSMF, KDE and all the little projects are a non-profit, does not mean they cannot raise money. Last time OSMF raised money for hardware, the target was reached in 2 days. And it makes sense to have a few central servers serving many projects. Not only does it simplify things like applying patches and performance tuning, but the planet diffs also has a certain amount of fixed processing to them. All you do is form an association and pool the donations you receive. And we know that the service will not be swamped overnight by Google users or some other large site. Those large commercial companies have high standards, even for their free products. Our data is not good enough and they will loose too many users if the site gets overloaded. And while this discussion has been about searching (geocoding) it also applies to routing. For $12 a day you can rent a pretty nice server. Ok, now I'm in the fouth dimension You'd want me to spend $12 a day to provide geolocalisation for an OSM editor (if you didn't read the thread, I remind you I'm speaking of Merkaartor)!!?? I really don't understand OSM anymore... When all was needed was Sorry, guys, we'll try to plan our servers redeployment a bit more in advance and inform you, including service closure... I assume the position regarding Nominatim is the same, so I might as well remove support for it, as it could close anytime. Still wondering why it exists, then... - Chris - ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On 1 September 2010 15:14, Chris Browet c...@semperpax.com wrote: While I'd completely agree in a business world, don't forget we are FLOSS developers working on software in our free time. We don't (at least I don't, and I doubt Marble has) have a server. OSMF do. Just put a big red sticker on the wiki saying ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE OUR WEB SERVICES, SETUP YOUR OWN!, then... - Chris - Lets calm down a little. :-) There are 3 reasons why I called for the short notice of shutdown: 1) gazetteer's data hasn't been updated for over 2 years. Internally it has been considered to be deprecated. Likely we should have announced this earlier. Oh well. 2) When I checked the usage recently it was extremely low. I wasn't aware Marble used gazetteer. Marble does not provide a User-Agent when querying gazetteer. If it had, I would have been less eager. 3) We have other services that are waiting for hardware. Mistakes have been made... now lets move on. I'm going to have a hack at creating a namefinder/gazetteer - nominatim bridge script. Regards Grant ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Torsten Rahn tac...@t-online.de wrote: Well, I just browsed through the announce list and to be honest I think the deprecation of a public API really should have been announced there a year ago if it was already obvious that it would get discontinued. Personally I'd say it should be good practice to announce the deprecation half a year before shutdown of the service on osm-announce. The OSM project doesn't run high-availability APIs - there's no guarantees, and certainly not any kind of availability guarantee when we no longer maintain something that we used to. If you want to use an OSM service in one of your applications, then I would suggest firstly, and most importantly, that the application doesn't have a *.openstreetmap.org URL embedded anywhere in the code. It's bad practise - see http://techfortesco.blogspot.com/2009/10/tesco-finders-towncity-search-not.html . If your app talks to a domain under your own control, then it gives you options to rewrite your queries and point them at a different service. Secondly, remember that we're an open-source, volunteer project kind of thing, so have appropriate expectations! If the server had stopped working and nobody was interested in fixing it, then you'd have had zero notice. On the other hand, if you have someone who's interested in running the namefinder service, and have the hardware and hosting to do so, then you have more than the OSM project has on all counts and that would be great! Cheers, Andy ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
On 31/08/2010 11:44, Andy Allan wrote: Secondly, remember that we're an open-source, volunteer project kind of thing, so have appropriate expectations! If the server had stopped working and nobody was interested in fixing it, then you'd have had zero notice. On the other hand, if you have someone who's interested in running the namefinder service, and have the hardware and hosting to do so, then you have more than the OSM project has on all counts and that would be great! I should add that independently of the server on which it was running, the namefinder index hadn't been updated in over 2 years. I tried very hard last summer and the rate of increase of OSM data defeated me. It needs some serious work to make it viable again in an environment where the data volume is 10x more than it was when I first wrote it, time which I didn't have, and also I didn't see the point when nominatim provided essentially that rewrite. If someone wanted to write a gateway just to convert formats, I imagine we could resurrect the gazetteer URL pointing at the Nominatim server. Andy's right about embedding URLs, but that's too late for you unfortunately. David ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Hi, Am Montag, 30. August 2010 19:45:20 schrieb Brian Quinion: On 30 August 2010 16:33, Torsten Rahn tac...@t-online.de wrote: Would there be a way of leaving nominatim support intact via the given API just with more limited capabilities (so that it still works with reduced quality and taking less hardware resources)? I think you have confused the services - the nominatim service is not being discontinued, rather it is the previous namefinder service that is being discontinued. Namefinder has now been depreciated and not updated for just over a year. Sorry, I was typing nominatim when I should have typed namefinder. All versions of Marble which get shipped with Linux Distributions are using namefinder (and _not_ nominatim). :-( nominatim is hosted on nominatim.openstreetmap.org I believe that Marble is already using the nominatim service and as such this should not require any changes. Unfortunately the problem still exists. The only version that has nominatim support is the Marble version that just got released a few days ago. However that one is not significantly deployed yet. All Linux distributions are still shipping Marble with the namefinder in their most recent version. :-( So the issue is going to persist for about the next 6 months. In that light could you answer my other questions? Best Regards Thanks in advance, Torsten -- Brian ___ Marble-devel mailing list marble-de...@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
Re: [OSM-dev] [Marble-devel] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired
Hi, Am Montag, 30. August 2010 22:05:59 schrieb Matt Amos: nominatim will continue to work and if someone were to write a forwarding service which talks namefinder protocol, it could provide a stop-gap. Since we currently pretty much rely on namefinder such a wrapper could possibly solve the issue :-) Is there a low traffic OSM announcement list that provides announcements like these for people who rely on OpenStreetMap services? there is an announce list, but for development announcements like this one, this dev list is the best place. Well, I just browsed through the announce list and to be honest I think the deprecation of a public API really should have been announced there a year ago if it was already obvious that it would get discontinued. Personally I'd say it should be good practice to announce the deprecation half a year before shutdown of the service on osm-announce. Best Regards, Torsten alternatively, a commercial service from one of the companies selling OSM-based services might be willing to give an enterprise guarantee. cheers, matt ___ Marble-devel mailing list marble-de...@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel ___ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
