Bundle osrm-components with node-osrm

[daniel-j-h]

The use case came up to quickly iterate on components and a modified profile making use of the shapefile generated by osrm-components. At the moment we do not bundle osrm-components mainly because it is an internal tool, we run it on the demo server anyway, and there is the debug map rendering components in real-time.

Can we bundle osrm-components easily with this package for npm?

What I can see on the osrm side is components not being supported by the mason build? Is this because of libgdal? @springmeyer any insights here - what's your take on this ticket?

cc @geohacker @srividyacb @oini

[TheMarex]

Yeah we don't bundle it because we don't want to depend on libgdal (of which we require a super outdated version that doesn't even ship with Debian anymore as far as I recall).

One way around this would be to let osrm-components emit geojson and use tippecanoe to convert it to vector tiles we can use.

[springmeyer]

What I can see on the osrm side is components not being supported by the mason build? Is this because of libgdal? @springmeyer any insights here - what's your take on this ticket?

Yes, we could support libgdal in the mason build (there are mason packages for gdal) but @TheMarex and I decided not to. I'm still in support of this because gdal is a large download and would slow down the mason fetch. I also agree that the best route forward is to target geojson in osrm-components to avoid a gdal dep.

[danpat]

Another alternative:

http://shapelib.maptools.org/

I've used this, it works. The shapefile format is significantly smaller than a GeoJSON output would be. For our use case, we would only need a very simple wrapper.

[daniel-j-h]

Let's keep the discussion here free of upstream decisions, we already have

• Remove osrm-components osrm-backend#2176
• Make osrm-backend work with GDAL 2 osrm-backend#1738

which outlines pros and cons of going the GeoJSON way.

[daniel-j-h]

Project-OSRM/osrm-backend#3570 just landed upstream unblocking us from bundling osrm-components with node-osrm in the 5.6 release. Let's ship this!