[postgis-devel] PAGC Address Standardizer some thoughts on how to organize

[Paragon Corporation]

I just forked the PAGC address standardizer into PostGIS trunk for release
as part of PostGIS 2.2

http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/changeset/12716

Right now it's all self-contained and that's kind of nice in a way but
doesn't quite follow our model

Steve -- can you make sure you can access the folder and make edits?


Things I'm planning to do and just want to make sure no one has issue or if
they have suggestions that would be helpful

1) Create folder in extensions of our repo and move the address_standardizer
extension files to their
I'd still like it to be able to be built separately if people wish (similar
to how we have liblwgeom I think) and my only reservation with breaking out
like this is that it makes it less compact.

2) Beef up the documentation -- right now all we have is how to install it
in our install section of manual (and that of course needs to be update with
new link now that its part of our repo)
http://postgis.net/docs/manual-dev/postgis_installation.html#installing_pagc
_address_standardizer 

So I'm going to add an additional .xml (separate from tiger and install,
explaining all the nuances of the lexer / rule/ parser files)


3) Before release, I'd like to put logic in the configure.ac so we do the
same checks and build if all dependencies are available and flag for pcre
library.  Right now to build I just add to my cppflags and shlib_link.
 This I imagine I'll need help with since the configure.ac script is pretty
alien to me.


4) Build separate extensions for the custom gaz/lex/rules currently present
and add more. Right now to run the packaged dictionaries you need to run the
lex,gaz,rules.sql files which is cumbersome from a newbie stand-point.

This one I'm actually thinking just rolling the current one in the base
extension and then having extensions for custom ones. Since at least US
people will just use the base one or if they are using tiger geocoder the
tiger geocoder one already packaged with tiger geocoder extension.


5) this one I'm still thinking about because it'll be a major breaking
change -- and that would be just to have current tiger geocoder require
address_standardizer and swap out the norm_addy object with the
address_standardize std_address one. But that requires a bit of rework and
assurance that package maintainers can build address_standardizer without
too much fuss.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Regina