Major changes to the mapping process

The entire production process for OAM maps has become somewhat outdated, so a number of upgrades to the development and production environments have become necessary. The Linux environment within Windows (WSL2) has been migrated from Debian 11 to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which has far-reaching consequences.

1.) Python 2 is dead

• This means that all Python scripts must be converted to Python 3; this affects:
• The software that generates the contour lines had to be replaced = these may differ very slightly from the previous ones in terms of curve rounding.
• The script that transfers the Mapsforge POI files to Locus, using the pyspatialite library among other things, had to be rewritten to use mod_spatialite.
  Explanation: SQLite3-Spatialite is used for fast proximity searches for POIs in the apps.
• 90% of the Python OSM tools now need to be moved into an isolated Python environment (venv) = everything needs to be set up from scratch, including the GDAL bindings.
• The script that calculates the sea/land areas from Jochen Topf’s SHAPE files has been replaced.

2.)
The alignment and modification of the original OSM data via OSMOSIS TagTransform now takes 1–2 hours (!!) for average-sized maps alone, and significantly longer for the large Germany maps or the Alps. Steffen, a C++ programmer who has often helped me out of a tight spot, has now made available a new C++-based TagTransform that is significantly faster – but may also contain some initial bugs….

3.)
The OSM PLACE=* relations, which I had largely eliminated after converting them to NODES, I was forced to reactivate in some cases, which has led to massive side effects in terms of rendering times – these have now multiplied for some maps – on average, a complete map set now takes a good five days longer to complete, which is rather annoying.
Here I have to painstakingly debug again to find out which giant relations are causing this (99% of which are completely unnecessary).

If there are any issues with the next updates (including the one coming in April), please let us know in the forum.

Wishing you all a lovely summer,
the OpenAndroMaps team