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 <paul(a)paulnorman.ca> 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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