[Marble-devel] [OSM-dev] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired

[Grant Slater]

On 1 September 2010 15:14, Chris Browet <cbro at semperpax.com> wrote:
> While I'd completely agree in a business world, don't forget we are FLOSS
> developers working on software in our free time.
> We don't (at least I don't, and I doubt Marble has) have "a server". OSMF
> do.
> Just put a big red sticker on the wiki saying "ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE OUR WEB
> SERVICES, SETUP YOUR OWN!", then...
> - Chris -

Lets calm down a little. :-)

There are 3 reasons why I called for the short notice of shutdown:

1) gazetteer's data hasn't been updated for over 2 years. Internally
it has been considered to be deprecated. Likely we should have
announced this earlier. Oh well.
2) When I checked the usage recently it was extremely low. I wasn't
aware Marble used gazetteer. Marble does not provide a User-Agent when
querying gazetteer. If it had, I would have been less eager.
3) We have other services that are waiting for hardware.

Mistakes have been made... now lets move on.

I'm going to have a hack at creating a namefinder/gazetteer ->
nominatim bridge script.

Regards
 Grant