[needs-packaging] mod_tile / renderd

mod_tile is an apache module to server and coordinate rendering of map tiles such as for OpenStreetMap tile server.

With the availability of OpenStreetMap data (the free wiki worldmap, CC-BY-SA licensed), it is becoming increasingly possible and popular to host ones own world wide map tile server with customized style sheets. Mod_tile and renderd together with a postgis database and mapnik rendering are one set of programs to make it possible. Mod_tile is the apache module that takes requests from clients and either serves them directly if the requested tiles are already available or communicates to the deamon renderd to get them renderd through mapnik on the fly or in the background.

Ubuntu already has the postgis, mapnik and osm2pgsql in its repositories. It would be really nice if the two missing packages mod_tile and renderd would also be included in the repositories to make it even easier to install your own map tile server. It would also be nice if osm2pgsql could be updated to a more recent version (Lucid is still on version 0.66.20090526 whereas debian unstable has version 0.69+r20104, which is still a bit out of data, but much better than the one in Ubuntu). Overall in the meantime, the development of osm2pgsql, mod_tile and renderd have stabilized a lot, sufficiently that the "slower" update process of once every 6 moth of the ubuntu packaging should no longer be a problem and thus hopefully warrant to be included in the repositories.

Both mod_tile and renderd have debian packaging descriptions in their source code repositories.

sourcecode-url: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/utils/mod_tile
license: GPLv2