The hackfest started just yesterday around noon with the arrival of six crazy hackers who will spend four days working on MapOSMatic. For the first day, we spent some time setting up MapOSMatic on the laptop of all developers and then started working on different topics :
- A group started experimenting with Nominatim in order to improve the city lookup feature of the MapOSMatic website. This is very important for several reasons. First because for the moment our city lookup mechanism only finds the city if the entered name matches exactly the one in the database (spaces, dashes and accents included). And also because we have no way of letting the user choose between several cities of the same name, which is very important as we intend to put the worldwide database into production soon. The initial work we did is to add a small gateway to Nominatim in MapOSMatic (see this commit). The rest of the work is being worked on now.
- Another developer worked on the infrastructure to allow the adaptation of OCitySMap to other languages: how the street names should be sorted, what are the common prefixes for streets, places, roads, etc. See this commit, this commit, this commit, this commit, this commit and this commit. Support is only for fr_FR and en_GB at the moment, and only at the OCitySMap level. Nothing has (yet) been implemented to select this from the MapOSMatic website, but it’s obviously on the TODO-list for this hackfest.
- The documentation for installing OCitySMap and MapOSMatic has been improved and updated for newer distributions.
- The german translation contributed by malenki has been added to the website and now allows to access the MapOSMatic website in German. Contributions for other languages welcome, contact us for details.
The previous hackfest took place in August in Toulouse (south of France) where we enjoyed a very nice and warm whether, wearing shorts, eating tomatoes and cucumbers straight from the garden. It was just a perfect summer hackfest. Now, we’re in Méridon (near Paris), where snow has fallen since Friday and was falling again today, so we are enjoying a perfect winter hackfest, with a nice tartiflette yesterday evening ! 