Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@iki.fi> writes:
On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 04:58:40PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
I don't understand how we can be talking about "default style" and "multi-layer map" at the same time. It would seem that the default style should support a map that is broadly useful to all people in all circumstances (a tall order).
Making the default style modular could be a mere refactoring change at first. It does not need to have any end-user visible effects.
It may be that we end up with a rural and and urban default style, and people have to choose.
If we split the default style so that it imports a number of substyle definitions, then it would be easy to introduce and maintain an urban' or 'sparse' style: it would just import a small number of the substyles that the default style is based on.
That sounds excellent to me. What I was not comfortable with was trimming the one true style. But having a few top-level files that include a number of substyles would be great, and I don't care whether sparse or full is default as long as both are in-tree and maintained. It will be an interesting experiment to see what people prefer.
A multi-layer map with selectable elemnts is a reason to change the default style to simple when the out-of-the-box mkgmap can process the files multiple times, make transparent layers according to a (supplied!) config file, and then merge the results multiple layers into one .img (and make multiple .gmapi/windows). It doesn't seem we are there yet.
Right. The refactoring of the default style would be only a first step on a long path.
Based on what Felix told us, we would probably also need to provide end-users with a simple way of converting multiple .img files to a single gmapsupp.img, so that users of old and new devices can make use of the map layers.
Agreed, and you don't have to get that old to need a single file - my etrex vista hcx bought in spring 2009 and still being sold is like that.