Re: No bug-report address for OSM packge

[Daniel Mendler <mail@daniel-mendler.de>]

On 5/8/22 01:08, Richard Stallman wrote:
>   > 1. The search currently returns the results in the language of the
>   > locations which have been found.
> 
> I can see various possible meanings for that.
> Do you mean, it returns each result in that result's own language?

Yes, this is what I meant. But I've changed it. In the newest version,
the results are returned in the language specified by the variable
`osm-search-language'. If you set this variable to the empty string,
then each result is returned "in that result's own language".

>   > Osm.el comes with multiple preconfigured map
>   > servers which render the map in different ways.
> 
> Could you explain what "server" means here?  Are you talking about web
> servers that Emacs contacts across the internet?  If not, that, then
> what sort of thing are they?

Yes, the map tiles are provided by a specialized web server. An example
tile lives at the URL: https://tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/42.png

You can take a look at the wiki of available tile servers:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers

osm.el comes with a list of preconfigured tile servers, which are all
free to use (funded by donations) and based on free software. You can
chose one of them by clicking on the button in the header-line.

>   >  For example the
>   > "Mapnik(de)" server renders the labels in both Latin script and the
>   > local language.
> 
> That sounds like what I want.  Does the use of this require an
> internet connection?  Or is it software and data loaded locally
> so it could be used without an internet connection?

Yes, this requires an internet connection. Setting up the map rendering
and map data base server locally is a major undertaking. I don't
recommend it if you are not already intrinsically interested in the
OpenStreetMap project itself, e.g., if you are a OpenStreetMap server
administrator or developer of the free server software. As of today, the
current full OpenStreetMap data dump in the form of an XML file has a
size of 115GB. If you decompress this file it blows up to about 1.5TB.

> Is this documented in the package documentation?

The use of the internet is documented implicitly in the README, but one
could be more explicit about it. I see the words "fetches", "tile
servers" and "curl" in the README.

Daniel