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Maximkaaa / galileo

General purpose cross-platform GIS-rendering library written in Rust
Apache License 2.0
362 stars 24 forks source link

Starting on Documentation / a wiki #71

Open kylerchin opened 3 months ago

kylerchin commented 3 months ago

I think we need to figure out how to put documentation out on how to get started, or how to run basic projects / setup a development environment to contribute back to galileo. It would probably massively improve access and we could onboard more contributors that way.

In addition or subtitution, a discord server?

Maximkaaa commented 3 months ago

I agree, some write up of basic concepts of the library is necessary. And a simple tutorial would also be helpful for new users. But at this point I'm afraid it will get outdated very quickly. There are a few fundamental things that might sill change. For example, I think the current approach for generic symbols is too cumbersome, but I haven't figured out yet a way to make it better. Also, the way feature layers are edited is not ideal, and event handling seems like it requires too much code to do very little... Also the CRS system even though it seems to be working, I'm not sure how convenient it would be in some more complex scenarios. Another thing is the way vector tiles are styled will definitely change, probably to use the same symbols as feature layers.

So what I was planning to do is after I finish working on labels, I wanted to write a couple of simple applications. For example, a simple vector tiles styler, or a .shp file viewer. Just to see narrow and inconvenient places of the library. After which add a rust-style book right in the repository describing basics. It would be hosted on Github Pages.

I don't mind if anyone would start this work already, but I'm afraid that some parts would have to be rewritten....

I'm not sure that a dedicated discord server would be of any use now. I definitely don't want to manage it. There's Github discussions which can be used to ask anything. If you find Discord more convenient, we could ask some other team, like geo to create a channel for us.

kylerchin commented 3 months ago

I'm working on an open source map for public transport Catenary Maps. The entire backend is in rust but the frontend is crappy and written in Javascript. My idea is to re-write the entire frontend into Rust, so galileo + some UI library and then put it on Web, Apple, and Android. That's my primary motivation to work on Galileo, so I definitely can assist in the example making. I'm really excited for labels to come through! Would love to help out in terms of ergonomics of using the library and how to document it.

Channel in Geo server would be great because it can allow for some casual conversion and community around the project, I agree though, most discussion should happen on GitHub discussions.