2020-11-16 Shield tables bug found, at last

I finally found the source of the duplicated data in the OSM shield tables. It turns out that since the 'shieldway' table is a per-way table, it's cleaned out only if a way is deleted or replaced, and not if the way is just updated.

I wrote it up in detail in an issue at the osm2pgsql project. so I'm not going to repeat a lot of text here. With various work-arounds, I'm to the point where I can handle:

• inserts, updates, and deletes of ways
• inserts and updates of route relations

Deleting route relations causes a mess. Everything is deleted cleanly by referential integrity constraints ON DELETE CASCADE, but then the Lua script goes and reinserts the relation memberships back into the shieldway table, violating its foreign key constraint since the relation is no longer there.

I can't see a workaround for that bit, so I opened the issue above as a cry for help.

Fortunately, it's vanishingly rare to delete a route relation, so I think I can run for a while this way, and move on to trying for minutely updates. I think the next step is just that - work out how to switch osmosis to pulling from the main OSM database and trigger it minutely. I see there's a Wiki page on the subject, and I have the polygon files for the extracts I'm working with. How hard can it be? (Yes, I know, that phrase is right up there with “hold my beer,” but I'm a crazy programmer.

Next up after that, I think, will be to see if I can switch my personal map server over to auto-generated and cached tiles. That'll probably involve retooling the server to run off Apache or Nginx rather than althttpd, which fills me with dread, because I love the “zero administration” aspects of the latter - Richard Hipp is a master of the “It Just Works” school of software design. But I really want to see if going to tiles generated on the fly would allow it to scale to a whole continent, rather than about a fourth of the Lower 48 of the US.