i was thinking of having them be part of a "release" so that they persist forever. it is often the case for admins that you basically dont want to touch them if you finally found a version of the planet where all of them seem unbroken 😄 for timezones it changes infrequently so the same applies but for a different reason

this here where we can attach binaries to a release:

Ah also cool actually. Then we’d ideally release every time we know admin stuff or timezone stuff changed (not counting broken osm shit of course). that’ll be on a tighter schedule than our current release habits;)

hahahaha sick burn 😄

it is often the case for admins that you basically dont want to touch them if you finally found a version of the planet where all of them seem unbroken

Yeah, I'm with @kevinkreiser on this one ;) in practice I update admins maybe once/month tops and have never had any issues / heard complaints from end users.

Given that fact, I have it on my TODO list to look at using Daylight for admins. I'll report back what I find (someone poke me please if I don't update within a few weeks), but it seems rather appealing for this use case, as it 1) will be reasonably up to date, 2) is completely OSM data, but 3) ostensibly tends to be "less broken" on average.

Don’t we even parse ALL of the admins, despite only using level 2 & 4? I’ve never seen a broken country, and I check regularly. States maybe in some places? Even if, that’s hardly relevant. In other words, I’d not be too worried about broken admins either for Valhalla. For geocoding/other purposes that’s a totally different discussion.

Don’t we even parse ALL of the admins, despite only using level 2 & 4?

Quite possibly...

I’ve never seen a broken country, and I check regularly. States maybe in some places? Even if, that’s hardly relevant. In other words, I’d not be too worried about broken admins either for Valhalla.

I've never had anyone complain with our hosted services either, but that may be a function of it being heavily skewed towards NA and EU which have pretty good data and large communities.

The main reason I think Daylight / Overture are interesting is that it's purely OSM derived, on a rolling snapshot + patches basis (and is also fairly certain to have any vandalism of admin names reverted, though then again that has also been fairly rare; it's more commonly an issue with city and other place names). Those are interesting properties (IMO) for published "base" datasets from the Valhalla project. Just a thought.

Yeah sorry, I should’ve made it clearer that this is my personal, heavily biased opinion against those distros. You’re very likely right regarding admins in Daylight. In fact I think it’s the only thing it’s useful for in real life.

it's also very useful if you're worried about buildings coverage in your map display since it has a bunch of added sources for that

aren't the additional footprints AI generated? in my book that'd be barely usable. seems they add some ESRI data, but sounds like only for addressing, not footprints. admittedly their footprint source description is just 2 sentences.