[Live-demo] [OSGeo] #1167: Retire MapTiler

[OSGeo]

#1167: Retire MapTiler
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 Reporter:  camerons  |       Owner:  live-demo@…              
     Type:  task      |      Status:  new                      
 Priority:  major     |   Milestone:  OSGeoLive7.0             
Component:  LiveDVD   |    Keywords:  maptiler                 
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Comment(by hamish):

 Cameron wrote:
 > I'd like to hear thoughts on whether we should be retiring MapTiler.

 Preface: I view the live disc as "the best of open source mapping", not
 just "the latest developments in open source mapping". And so I don't mind
 looking after some oldies but goodies if they're not impacting anything
 else. I also don't think we should be in the business of picking
 favourites
 in the case of projects with parallel functionality- instead we should be
 providing options a, b, and c for our users to try out to decide which is
 best for them without having to go to the trouble of installing and
 learning
 how to get started with all the available options on their own. (2c)


 > My thoughts are that we should be helping new users find established
 > Open Source projects, which typically are projects which have a strong
 > community behind them.
 >
 > I note that MapTiler hasn't changed version number since OSGeo-Live 3.0,

 you'll notice that PROJ.4, `grep`, and `ls` don't change much either. It
 doesn't mean they aren't used or are no longer useful.

 > and is still reported as a beta status.

 I see no reason for it to be classified as such.

 > I also note from the Ohloh metrics, there seems to be very little
 > development:
 > http://live.osgeo.org/en/metrics.html

 As above, that's somewhat of an orthogonal measure, just like SLOC can
 be a rather poor measure of a programmer's output. Indicative, perhaps.
 But definitive? nope.

 > I suspect that users might be moving to another project instead? Eg:
 > GeoWebCache?

 GeoWebCache is a geotile-aware network proxy. MapTiler is a front end
 to the gdal2tiles command line program which takes a raster image as input
 and creates an openlayers web page and directories of image tiles for
 each given zoom level. Gdal2tiles comes with GDAL (and so is updated as
 needed). As long as the command line interface to gdal2tiles doesn't
 change, then MapTiler doesn't need to: it keeps going just with an
 upgraded GDAL engine each time.
 One helps serve map tiles, the other creates them.

 It's a nice little tool, only 440kB (compressed), and AFAIK both the
 fastest and simplest tool available to get a live web map up on the
 internet. A couple of clicks, copy the result over to a web server,
 and you're done in 3-5 minutes with very little training needed.
 That "holy cow I'm done!?" + "I made that :)" user reaction is the
 main reason I want to keep it. It makes FOSS4G look easy and good.


 regards,
 Hamish

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/1167#comment:3>
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