On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 2:42 AM, Ross Scanlon <i...@4x4falcon.com> wrote: >> Better yet - just don't change it. This sort of change just isn't >> worth the pain and hundreds of developer hours that could be better >> spent on moving the project forward. Yes - this sort of change might >> make the tag heirachy prettier - but not enough to justify the work. > > Garbage. > > It's not hundred of hours of developer work to change this. > > If the renderer programming is up to scratch then it should be able to > automatically accept changes like this. > > One of the programs I have done some development on has this built in.
Well done. Pretty much none of the others do. I look forward to your patches :) Mapnik for instance has manual rules - they will need to be changed. Worse than that osm2pgsql (the import tool) only imports certain keys so implementing emergency=* requires a complete reimport of the database - about 30 hours even on very good hardware. Then the changes need to be tested and deployed. I can get to 3 or 4 hours of actual developed work without even trying. Now times that by the number of applications. For applications that are deployed to the desktop or mobiles the situation is even worse - it might not be possible to release a new version of the time being, the change might have to wait for the next update cycle and then all the users have to actually get round to updating. Or maybe they have to code in some sort of hack to change the new tag back to the old tag for compatibility. And what about multi-lingual support? A lot of apps are in multiple languages, they might well need to go back to their translators and check that the new tagging doesn't result in a subtle change in meaning. But all this is the tip of the iceberg - you are missing the time it takes to monitor the tagging list (most developers will not even be on it), to find out which changes are important and to work out if things are exactly equivalent or if there is a change of meaning. I think hundreds was a fairly reasonable number. -- Brian _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
