[Maps-l] What's being done and what needs doing?

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

Firstly it's great to see so much interest in this project, we now
have approx. 60 subscribers to this mailing list just a few days after
it poofed into existence.

What's the current status of the new boxes Wikimedia-DE is donating,
and more importantly, do we have people interested in setting up the
required infrastructure there? I.e. the Planet.osm -> DB -> Mapnik
tile generation process? Someone at the hacking days volunteered to do
mapnik stuff but I forget whether we had a DB admin yet.

Anyway, what I've been working on is the MediaWiki related stuff
mentioned in the techblog:

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/openstreetmap-maps-will-be-added-to-wikimedia-projects/

I started by hacking the SlippyMap so that it supports multiple maps per page:

    http://u.nix.is/phase3/index.php?title=Slippy_Test

It's still somewhat hacky, e.g. it duplicates the whole OpenLayers
template for each map.

Could someone more familiar with OpenLayers please refactor it so that
it's possible to just call a function to include the map, something
like:

    <script type="text/javascript">include_slippymap( lat, lon, zoom,
....)</script><noscript><img
src="http://static.map/lat/lon/zoom</noscript>

I'm not asking for the *extension* to be edited (although that would
be great), just fore a HTML/JS example.

Note that this is probably easier in OpenLayers trunk due to
OpenLayers.Layer.OSM being included now:

    http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/1950

(But I don't know if we want to run OpenLayers trunk)

There are also some more OpenLayers-related issues on the wiki page
for the extension:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Slippy_Map_MediaWiki_Extension#Known_issues_.2F_ideas

In particular the Attribution issue & snapping to lat/lon 0/0.

And it it enough to have the alternate static map inside <noscript>?
Does this work on all the odd browsers out there that we want to
support? If so that'll make everything else much easier.

As for the static map this is how the Export tab on the OSM site does it:

    http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/sites/rails_port_branches/api06/app/controllers/export_controller.rb#L19

I.e. it redirects to the cgi-bin/export script on the tileserver,
which is a python program which renders directly from the database:

    http://svn.openstreetmap.org/sites/tile.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/export

For example:

   http://tile.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/export?bbox=-18.1343,65.676,-18.0711,65.6948&scale=27500&format=png

Except on Wednesday you'll see an empty map (only coastline) if you
look at that, since the osm2pgsql import is running on the tileserver.
I don't know whether that's something that's a problem we could hack
around in our own setup while updating the Planet mirror, maybe by
keeping two database copies. Or maybe by just creating static maps
from the tiles themselves instead, although they'll still have this
problem if an area that hasn't been pre-rendered is requested, OSM
itself is serving 404.png for tiles where that's the case since it's a
Wednesday.

In any case we need lat/lon/zoom to bbox/scale to use that script as-is.

What else needs be done/hacked up and who's interested in doing it?