[postgis-tickets] [PostGIS] #3698: CENSUS Download path for TABBLOCK

[PostGIS]

#3698: CENSUS Download path for TABBLOCK
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  Reporter:  EvanCarroll     |      Owner:  robe
      Type:  defect          |     Status:  new
  Priority:  high            |  Milestone:  PostGIS 2.4.0
 Component:  tiger geocoder  |    Version:  2.3.x
Resolution:                  |   Keywords:
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Changes (by robe):

 * milestone:  PostGIS 2.3.2 => PostGIS 2.4.0


Comment:

 This is a bit more involved than I thought since it doesn't follow the
 convention folder_name/..folder_name.zip.  So I'll deal with this when
 they release 2017 data and just disable the download in the loader tables.
 They probably put a 10 in it because it hasn't been changed since 2010.


 The tabblock tables are not used for anything so probably a useless bit of
 data for people only interested in geocoding.

 The only reason I included it way back is the machinery to download
 tabblock was already there for folks who needed to do census block
 research.  It should always have been disabled by default and require
 users to explicitly go into the tiger.lookup_tables to enable it.

 Regarding whether tiger geocoder should be part of PostGIS or not.
 Historically it always has been, and before extension building, it was
 pretty detached in the extras/tiger_geocoder folder You can still build
 and install it that way by just making changes to the files in
 extras/tiger_geocoder and using the shell scripts.

 The only part the tiger geocoder that relies on the PostGIS build is
 wrapping it as an extension. That itself could probably be detached so
 that if you really wanted to build just the geocoder extension file, you
 could cd into the extensions folder and just build that.  I could at the
 very least provide instructions on how to hack the scripts in extensions
 folder to do that.

 One great benefit of having it as part of PostGIS is that cloud offerings
 like Amazon RDS and Heroku build it and so do all the various package
 maintainers, Ubuntu, Yum etc.  If it wasn't part of PostGIS I think
 packagers would be less inclined to go out of their way to build it and
 much fewer people would use it.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3698#comment:5>
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