Bug#793938: [LCFC] templates://openstreetmap-carto/{templates}

[Justin B Rye]

Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> Justin B Rye wrote:
>> We never did find out *why* this package downloads stuff from the
>> Internet.
> 
> Because it needs the Natural Earth data to render the default style. The
> shapefiles are referenced in the various style sources (.mml files).

Lots of Debian software requires data files.  Normally the result is
that these dependencies go into data packages, like for instance
openstreetmap-icons.

> Updates to the various shapefiles happen separately from each other,
> they get aggregated in openstreetmap-carto to assemble it into a worldmap.
> 
> The above is only a clearification, don't quote it in the debconf templates.

If I ever found out why this package downloads stuff from the
Internet rather than just expressing a dependency on a data package
that contains it, I would ask for that information to go in the
package description.

Is it perhaps because the data is non-free?
 (No, that can't be right or it wouldn't be in main.)
Is it perhaps because the dataset requires very frequently updates?
 (In which case I might want to re-run the installer regularly...)
Is it perhaps because the dataset is huge?
 (In which case I might want to schedule the install for the weekend.)

Whatever the explanation is, it would probably only require the
addition of a single word into the phrase "necessary shapefiles" in
the long description - something like "up-to-date" or "multigigabyte".

(I don't know why it is that package descriptions for downloader
packages are always so unclear about the point of the exercise, but
your package hit debian-l10n-english at the same time as two others
that were equally uninformative - in one case supposedly for legal
reasons!)
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package