Successful Community Meetup

Last week we had our first virtual osm2pgsql community meetup. There was quite a bit more interest than we had anticipated. 16 developers and users talked about plans and ideas and many questions could be answered.

I started the meeting with a short intro about the development and documentation work we did in the last year, talked about where we are at the moment, and where our current development priorities are.

After the intro we had a wide-ranging discussion about existing and missing features in osm2pgsql. One hot topic were geometry transformations and computing of derived geometries like centroids, merged geometries and simplified geometries. This is high on our list of things to do, but before many of these features can be implemented some ground-work needs to be done cleaning up the geometry-related code.

Other topics were: tile expiry, multithreading, performance of osm2pgsql and PostgreSQL, docker scripts, connecting to different types of databases, better documentation, testing strategies, and many more.

The meeting showed that we have a diverse community with widely differing use cases. Some people use osm2pgsql more for ad-hoc imports of small data extracts to visualize in QGIS or do complex postprocessing on. Others use it to run planet-wide and minutely updated tile servers.

I hope the users got their questions answered and we developers certainly got some good ideas and suggestions from the community. One question that was discussed is how to best keep an osm2pgsql database up to date. There are several existing solutions but none of them is really easy to use, so Sarah wrote a new pyosmium-based script geared towards use with osm2pgsql, the pull request is currently in review.

Jochen Topf