On 28/12/2017 10:45, Daniel Koć wrote:
However after almost half a year we still don't have too many contributions from other people and I'm curious what are the main obstacles which prevent it and what else could we possibly change to make it easier? There's also more basic question: how many people are interested in contributing to osm-carto at all?
Speaking entirely personally, the main issue is just selfishness/laziness. I don't use the OSM Carto style much myself (there'd be too much information missing at the zoom levels I typically use) so I wouldn't get much benefit myself from an accepted change. In case it helps anyone who does want to contribute but doesn't quite know where to start I've added a diary entry https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/43041 that explains what I needed to do to submit https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2966 . There's actually a surprisingly large amount that needs to be done to support (in this case) 7 lines of changed code.
I'd also not assume that everyone is familar with CSS. In addition, the somewhat arcane way that some of the selections for layers are done in project.mml is, shall we say, not always that easy to follow.
Another reason why I've not added more pull requests is that in some cases I don't think that they'd be accepted. If I offered to "fix" the main problem described by https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/765 I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be accepted. As described in https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md , OSM Carto has somewhat conflicting goals - both as "an important feedback mechanism for mappers" and as an "exemplar stylesheet". Any map style will always be a compromise of course; you can't have "everything louder than everything else" which is why the requests for some features to be rendered will be denied (although I suspect that we underestimate how much more opportunity these is for rendering features at high zoom levels only).
Another reason is I suspect the "jumping through hoops" needed to get something accepted. See for example the discussion on https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2355 - it's clear that there's unlikely to be complete agreement there, and the result is no solution at all (essentially "perfect is the enemy of good").
With the last two issues it's difficult to know what to suggest - there has to be an overall style "direction" otherwise you just end up with something that is a bit of a mess. Likewise there have to be some standards, but sometimes I suspect that if the maintainers actually want to see a fix to a particular problem that they'll need help potential contributors a bit more. Obviously the docker info is a step in the right direction (I've not tried that myself so I can't point to specific pitfalls there).
Anyway, I hope the above helps (and please understand that it's not meant as a criticism either of the style or the maintainers - it's just trying to provide answers to the questions that were asked).
Best Regards, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
