Notices

Do you have a more simple way than liberapay (speak paypal) for donations?

thanks for asking! no, I don't. I like liberapay since its transparent - so all can learn from my experience. As for simplicity, I don't know much about it. I think it should be simple to go around the system by making payment a single time and just stop it. Some have done it before and its appreciated as much as anyone taking time and doing it.

Yes, sure.
But you/one will need another account on another system (and probably only via credit card)...

No, not really. You could just transfer from there to your bank account directly and there is no need to have anything in between.

@rinigus, AFAIU the OSM Scout Server Module: Fonts is currently only useful when providing Mapnik maps by OSM Scout Server.
As the Font Module is quite large (due to containing the Noto font), please clarify in its description on Openrepos (if so?):

• The Font Module benefits Mapnik users only.
• It is not used for displaying vector maps or OSM Scout bitmap maps.
• If it is a hard requirement for displaying Mapnik maps (i.e. no labels at all without it) or just enhancing the rendering of labels.

As I never used Mapnik offline maps in OSM Scout Server due to their huge size, I always wondered about aforementioned points.

P.S.: You may also consider altering the messages in OSM Scout Server, stating that the Font Module and / or Valhalla Module are "missing", as both are not needed for OSM Scout Server to work properly: I use libosmscout's maps and routing for a long time and they are working fine.

@olf, good point. There was a statement in Fonts module description, but I have added now a separate paragraph stressing it.

Fonts module is needed only if you use Mapnik backend.

Mapbox GL has the same fonts, but they are packaged differently, in Mapbox GL specific glyphs. These you download via OSM Scout Server and, in reality, they are larger than TTF fonts used by Mapnik. However, you probably store Mapbox GL data on SDCard and don't care much about it.

As for altering the messages - I'll take a look. I will link them to the selected profile. Opening an issue for it

Thinking about this - if the fonts module only contains the fonts and no executable code would it maybe make sense to turn it into a data pack that gets auto registered when users download the Mapnik rendering data ? IIRC there are already some global geographic datasets that serve a similar purpose.

This would automate one more thing, reduce number of packages users might need to install manually and possibly eliminate some out of space issues on devices with small rootfs volumes.

It depends on how we look into it.

These are Noto fonts which maybe attractive option for some other app to display full international characters set. If such interest will happen, we can repackage them accordingly.

Next, any investment of time into Mapnik maybe not so wise in long term. modRana is probably the only client which is using it and I would expect that, at some point, it will also switch to Mapbox GL. Which will leave us with the backend that nobody is using anymore. Use of the server on Linux is non-existent (probably only myself) and I don't see much reason for users to stick with Mapnik if suddenly all devices support Mapbox GL.

Moving over the data package is not trivial - not very difficult, but still would take time. It seems to me that this time can be spent better on other aspects of the map applications.

Actually, I plan to add Mapbox GL support in parallel with the current tile based widget. The main aim is to both enable early testing with fallback to the current widget & support for Jolla 1 class devices where Mapbox GL is not supposed to run very well.

But if some of the recent user feedback turns out to be correct (eq. Mapbox GL actually runs fine on Jolla 1 & similar) then this option might not be needed & modRana might be able to switch to Mapbox GL on Sailfish OS exclusively. Then indeed the Mapnik rendering might not longer be really needed.

Actually, I'm a Fedora user & packager (I maintain for example the Fedora pyotherside & pydbus packages) and have been thinking it might not be a bad idea to package the OSM Scout Server for Fedora to make it available to the broader Linux user community.

The features and APIs OSM Scout Server provides are more or less unrivaled by any other project and I can see many uses even on plain desktops/notebooks, such as offline POI search and map display. While desktop users are mostly online these days there might still be very valid usecases for using offline geodata, such as bad connectivity while traveling or wanting to guard ones privacy from online mapping vendors.

Also a bit subjective reason - I develop modRana primarily on desktop so it would be nice to have the same set of APIs available even during general development. Also modRana uses more and more of the awesome OSM Scout Server functionality, so having modRana on desktop as full featured as on Sailfish OS would be nice.

In any cases this is at this point still more or less a nice to have compared to Sailfish OS support, but I'm ready to help with package review & be a package maintainer if needed. There is also the possibility to use Copr, which is a Fedora service similar to PPAs/OBS to build OSM Scout Server packages rather than target inclusion as a "official" Fedora package from the start.

1.5.0 is out which should give better feedback to the users regarding missing plugins and data. There is no other new functionality in the server this time.

@MartinK: I'll probably have to port server's GUI to QtQuick then. This should be relatively simple and would allow using the server simply in Linux. Right now, console interface is rather un-intuitive and hard to use. Corresponding issue is opened, let's see when I can make it.

As soon as proper GUI is ready for Linux, would be great to package it for Fedora. Although, it will require packaging of Valhalla, probably.