How to stay updated on changes to osm.org? - General talk - OpenStreetMap Community Forum

How to stay updated on changes to osm.org? - General talk - OpenStreetMap Community Forum
How to stay updated on changes to osm.org?
General talk
ivanbranco
(ivanbranco)
April 17, 2025, 4:05pm
Hi, is there an official way to stay updated on new features and changes to
osm.org
Recently we’ve seen additions like the comments icon, a “changeset heatmap”, a new page listing changeset comments by user, and now multi-colored bboxes. But I always seem to discover these changes by chance — through Discord, the
better-osm thread
, or other random places.
Is there a centralized or official channel for keeping track of these updates?
11 Likes
Blaue bounding boxes
What’s new on the OpenStreetMap website?
General discussion about bad impact of bot edits on data consumers was: Proposed automated edit: retag surface=paving stones:30
SekeRob
April 17, 2025, 4:26pm
Maybe Gravitystorm’s Github such as this milestone page
Milestones - gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
A general-purpose OpenStreetMap mapnik style, in CartoCSS - Milestones - gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
1 Like
ezekielf
(Zeke Farwell)
April 17, 2025, 4:30pm
I have a look at the most recently merged pull requests from time to time. Distinguishing minor fixes from significant feature changes can be tough though.
Pull requests · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub
(edit: wrong link)
1 Like
silversurfer83
(silversurfer83)
April 17, 2025, 4:38pm
I really like many of the recent changes yet I have no clue about the ways of the Git so I would also welcome a short update in human readable form when new features ship.
I know that this creates even more work so I won’t be bugging those doing the work if there won’t be any easy to understand news snippets.
Thank you for your work.
5 Likes
Richard
(Richard Fairhurst)
April 17, 2025, 9:23pm
The github repository that
@ezekielf
mentioned is the canonical source, but you can also follow the
rails-dev mailing list
which is a mirror of everything posted to the Github repository.
2 Likes
Mateusz_Konieczny
(Mateusz Konieczny)
April 19, 2025, 12:03pm
often lists bigger ones but it relies on someone using
Your submissions for weeklyOSM have become easier! – weekly – semanario – hebdo – 週刊 – týdeník – Wochennotiz – 주간 – tygodnik
6 Likes
ppku
(Ppku)
April 25, 2025, 11:27am
Here
a feature request on the source code repository.
Mateusz_Konieczny
(Mateusz Konieczny)
April 25, 2025, 12:36pm
as also posted on Github…
are you volunteering for maintaining it?
given quite scarce development resources it would probably better to spend them on reviewing 100+ waiting PRs (or fixing PRs based on reviews that were made)
also, while “Standard software development practice is to mark a version as a
tag
or a
release
” is true, this project does not do this and is closer to continuous deployment.
in general, you either need new people doing this or you ask people doing development to do less of it and spend time on extra paperwork/PR/promotion they were not doing so far.
Not in position to promise anything (I have no position on that software project), but if someone really wants changelog they can volunteer to maintain one.
1 Like
ppku
(Ppku)
April 25, 2025, 12:53pm
Hello, I think you’re seeing this too narrowly. When it starts being paperwork, it’s being done wrong. For any and all volunteer FOSS projects out there with a relevant userbase and occasional maintainers and 0 money and foundations, a changelog is a summary that it takes a few seconds to fill.
Mateusz_Konieczny
(Mateusz Konieczny)
April 25, 2025, 1:21pm
10
ppku:
it takes a few seconds to fill.
no
it takes longer
you probably meant it is as a hyperbole, but such dismissing of effort needed to do this is not helpful. Especially if you ask people to do extra work, unpaid and you are not willing to volunteer to do it yourself.
ppku:
When it starts being paperwork, it’s being done wrong
people have different tolerance to filing extra documents
ivanbranco
(ivanbranco)
April 25, 2025, 1:22pm
11
Uh, happy news from the GH issue:
I know
@1ec5
has plans to start publicising some of the more significant changes
4 Likes
courtiney
(Courtiney)
April 30, 2025, 4:55pm
12
Speaking as a member of the CWG, but not
for
the CWG, I want to try to see if there is a way for us to help:
If I am reading correctly, I think that the request is for a standard and reliable source for human readable updates on
osm.org
, correct? Ideally something that a person could subscribe to, or might be prompted to see when they log in to the site.
From the forum it also sounds like Github is too technical and the WeeklyOSM is too dependent on someone submitting these requests in a predictable way.
Does this sound right?
To me, the best option that is doable is to establish the “better-osm” thread as the official thread for milestone OSM improvements–we might need to evolve that thread into an established Topic with tags, to make it more official and easier to find, but it would be best to keep that information in this forum. Otherwise, it will get lost in the wikis and listserves.
The other option, which would be to feed major milestone to the front page of
OSM.org
, would require development by a volunteer, which is outside of the ability of the CWG.
This still leave us the challenge of how to know what is a valid update. As
@ezekielf
said, distinguishing minor fixes from significant feature changes can be tough. It’s subjective, especially without a dedicated person to make the call and publish the most user-relevant changes in “human readable” format. As a CWG member I could commit to posting the updates in a thread on this forum, but I have no way of knowing which one are important, nor how to translate pull requests into ordinary language.
If anyone could help with this, I’m happy to try to operationalize getting the updates into this forum.
Courtney
3 Likes
alan_gr
(Alan)
April 30, 2025, 5:05pm
13
courtiney:
establish the “better-osm” thread as the official thread for milestone OSM improvements
Does this refer to
the thread about the “better-osm-org”
script?
That doesn’t seem like the right place as it is mainly about an “add-on” script the people can choose to use to add functionality not provided “officially” by
osm.org
. There are probably quite a few users of that script on this forum (myself included), but we can’t expect the average visitor to
osm.org
to use it. I think what we are talking about here are updates to the official site.
5 Likes
Minh_Nguyen
(Minh Nguyễn)
April 30, 2025, 5:30pm
14
You’ve probably seen it elsewhere by now, but establishing more robust communication between the core software projects and the wider
OSM
community is one of my tasks as part of the
CSDF
role with the
OSMF
At the moment, I’m thinking of an informal user-oriented recap here on the forum, highlighting some selected changes to osm-website and similar projects, similar to what I’ve done
for
OHM
for some time. I’ll be trawling through the Git commit history and pull request discussions so you won’t have to. It would be on a roughly monthly basis, to give the developers a little breathing room for fit and finish. (I’ll probably be leaning on the
CWG
to amplify these changes for those who don’t follow the forum.)
That said, don’t wait for my posts; feel free to talk about the changes you see and rope me into any discussions where you want to provide feedback. Also, those who participate in
translating the website on Translatewiki.net
already get a sneak peak at most changes, to the extent that they affect user-facing strings. A little incentive for helping out with that non-coding aspect of the project.
13 Likes
Minh_Nguyen
(Minh Nguyễn)
May 14, 2025, 6:53pm
15
Minh_Nguyen:
At the moment, I’m thinking of an informal user-oriented recap here on the forum, highlighting some selected changes to osm-website and similar projects, similar to what I’ve done
for OHM
for some time. I’ll be trawling through the Git commit history and pull request discussions so you won’t have to. It would be on a roughly monthly basis, to give the developers a little breathing room for fit and finish.
I’ll post these regular updates in a separate thread:
What’s new on the OpenStreetMap website?
General talk
More color, prettier links, and less swimming
By popular demand
, I’m starting a regular series of posts summarizing the changes taking place in
openstreetmap-website
– the main OSM website and API. I trawled the many
merged pull requests
and
commits
from March 16 to today, distilling them into a hopefully more digestible list. Since the community here is mostly mappers and other casual website users rather than coders, I’ve mostly focused on user-facing changes.
In the future, I’ll continue pos…
7 Likes
NeatNit
(NeatNit)
May 14, 2025, 7:48pm
16
What’s new on the OpenStreetMap website?
I’d also appreciate feedback about this post in
the meta discussion about keeping track of changes
. Are these bullet points putting you to sleep? Do I need to explain the changes in more detail? Would you also like to hear about non-user-facing changes such as refactoring and unit test coverage?
I like it! It’s like a more focused variant of WeeklyOSM that’s specifically about OSM website. Seems like a good idea, especially if big or frequent changes are upcoming.
Thanks for the shoutout on my contribution (right-to-left language stuff)! I might slowly start contributing more to the project, we’ll see.
3 Likes
hlfan
(Marwin Hochfelsner)
May 15, 2025, 4:36am
17
I love this angle! Looking at the next open PRs, I’m eagerly awaiting how you will present them.
Although, I see some of my changes differently and the black-and-white decision if changes are user-facing as maybe not the best option. How likely most users will notice a change might be a thing to consider, I’m thinking of categories like “ohh that changed” and “something’s different, but I don’t know what”/“was that always this way?”.
The first category could be the headliners, and the second category of less noticeable changes could then be expanded with smaller things that are technically user-facing, and go a little deeper in the technical background. One change touching (barely, but still) the
placement of direction routing popups
comes to my mind.
But that and also the rest of this comment should be read while keeping my bias in mind.
1 Like
Minh_Nguyen
(Minh Nguyễn)
May 15, 2025, 4:58am
18
Ooh, I missed that change amid the refactoring. It would be useful to highlight the more subtle changes, while omitting changes that the maintainers might not want to commit to on a permanent basis, such as the technically publicly accessible implementation details around geo URIs.
I’d like to convert these posts into what Discourse calls “wiki posts”, so you and other contributors can correct any glaring errors and omissions. Unfortunately I’m not seeing the button to do that. Maybe it’s only limited to certain categories.
1 Like
ppku
(Ppku)
May 15, 2025, 4:36pm
19
@Mateusz_Konieczny
No hyperbole. You’re supposed to keep the changelog updated as part of the pull request. Of course it’s a PITA to scroll the commit history weeks later.
The maintainer gave the reason in the GitHub ticket, that source code publishing is an
implementation detail
and what’s being released is a service, while I assumed it was a FOSS app.
1 Like
Mateusz_Konieczny
(Mateusz Konieczny)
May 15, 2025, 4:46pm
20
ppku:
You’re supposed to keep the changelog updated as part of the pull request.
it also takes more than a few seconds to fill.
And this “you’re supposed” is not a general law of a nature
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