[mkgmap-dev] the verbose option and order of options

Sun Apr 30 09:03:06 BST 2017

Hi all,

I think the handling of options in mkgmap is a bit too tricky and has confused many users (myself included)  in the past.
One obvious problem is that mkgmap has so many options, another is that the order matters, and a third is that the effect of the 
options differ for different input files (osm format, polish (.mp) , type file .

I think about a rather simple change so that it prints the active options for each input file when the verbose option (or -v) is given, and also once for the combiner step 
This would be a rather simple change and probably helps in most cases.
I also think that the --verbose option should print a hint that shows this link:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/dev#Enabling_Debugging

Even better might be to warn about options which had no effect or which (probably) occured in the wrong order
Samples :
java -jar mkgmap.jar -c split_out\template.args --latin1 --bounds=bounds.zip   --index --family-id=3212 3212.txt
(wrong order of options, input files are processed with default values)
java -jar mkgmap.jar --housenumbers --bounds=bounds.zip *.img 
(these options have no effect when processing img files as input)
java -jar mkgmap.jar -description=my-map -c split_out\template.args --gmapsupp
(not good when template.args sets description for each input file)

This change is not so easy to implement and it might produce false warnings in special cases.

Comments?
Gerd