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I have found a trac ticket that has had no progress for a very long time what should I do? E.g. what can I do about trac tickets about things like
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For requests that your pet feature should be rendered in mapnik you are pretty much out of luck. The look and feel of mapnik is controlled by a few designers who (correctely in my opinion) think that the map should look good rather than include every possible bit of information. If you want a map that includes everything no matter how it looks try osmarender. If you don't like that you can set up your own mapnik instance and tweak your stylesheet to include your pet feature. For technical requests you have to convince the sysadmins, who are all volunteers and put in more time than we can resonably expect, that your request is more urgent than the other stuff on their plate. If the request requires code changes you can increase your chances by writing the necessary code and attach the patch file to the trac ticket; but sometimes the code change is relatively trivial and there are other reasons why the change is not performed. You will usually find a hint about this in trac. Above all: Remember that all the people who work for OpenStreetMap are volunteers. And in every community of volunteers those who put in their time and do things are in charge and those who nag but don't contribute are ignored unless their ideas sound like a fun thing to implement. |
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It is important to realise that anything you put into trac - even if it is a real bug and not an enhancement request - is actually you asking other people to commit resources to something. Even if you are willing to put in the coding work yourself - which is generally commendable - there might be other reasons against implementing your request, for example scarcity of computing resources, or design decisions, or even political reasons. A good place to discuss a ticket with those in charge and with other members of the community is usually the mailing list. Depending on what component you are talking about, there are different people in charge, and they will usually at least respond to your trac ticket in the trac system itself; if that does not happen, then it is likely that your ticket was overlooked or forgotten. It is important to remember that trac is a communications system for humans - when you write a trac ticket, you are talking to humans and you have to convince them that what you want is important enough for them to spend their time on. Occasionally, but very rarely, proponents of some kind of enhancement request are so persistent and lack even the most basic politeness and diplomacy skills ("I am right and how come that you idiots haven't implemented that yet???") that they turn out to be ignored in the end, no matter what the merit of the particular request. |
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The other answers have focused on why the bug you've put in hasn't been addressed, but I'm going to focus on the part of your question where you ask "What should I do?" The answer there is that if you feel very strongly about the bugs, you should learn the skills necessary to find them, and fix them. In this way, OSM is like any other FLOSS project. The best way to get something you want done within the project is to do the work yourself. In this case, it might mean to learn Mapnik, and learn the rendering rules you want, then submit them back. You may find they get approved. If not, you can run your own instance where the rendering is exactly how you want it.
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