Use maplibre instead of mapbox style spec

[ahocevar]

I'm putting this up for discussion, as an alternative to #939.

The one thing that makes me hesitant to make this change is that I don't know what the plans are for Maplibre to stick with or depart from the Mapbox style spec. If someone from @maplibre, maybe @birkskyum, could comment on that, it would make the decision easier.

[birkskyum]

Sure, since the Mapbox style spec has become proprietary, the plan for MapLibre is to continue developing the MapLibre Style Spec independently from Mapbox. The main divergence has so far been around atmosphere / globe features which were added after the fork, but the two style specs are still largely identical, and most changes happen as backwards-compatible additions, with both style specs still being on version 8.x.

[mbeckem]

@ahocevar It appears that new versions of @mapbox/mapbox-gl-style-spec will also fall under the proprietary license as of this commit: mapbox/mapbox-gl-js@a02c71b. So switching to MapLibre Style Spec seems like a good idea moving forward.

[ahocevar]

@mbeckem Thanks for the pointer!

If you are interested in using this module in a manner not expressly permitted by its license, please do not hesitate to contact [email protected] with details of what you have in mind.

I'll do this first, and see what the options are.

[orangemug]

I'm in favour of moving over to @maplibre/maplibre-gl-style-spec, reasons being:

• we have an opportunity to discuss any changes with the maplibre team (because it's public)
• the maplibre spec is open source, no issues with licensing
• I'm personally building a tool on-top of maplibre/openlayer 😄

[ahocevar]

Since I got no satisfying answer from Mapbox, I'm inclined to go in that direction too. But it's also tempting to create a new package, independent of both Mapbox and Maplibre, with a few more useful features (profiles, auto-generated docs, optimized for build size).

[orangemug]

@ahocevar the spec is in progress over at https://github.com/maparatus/ol-mapbox-style-spec, rendered spec at https://maparatus.github.io/ol-mapbox-style-spec/ (I'll continue to update issue #10 on progress).

That's based on the maplibre-gl spec. I'm happy to transfer that repository over once I complete the tests and update the spec.

From my perspective. It'd be fine to merge this in the meantime, as it'd be closer to the incoming spec work.

[ahocevar]

Finishing this now, mostly to get rid of the extra tooling needed for flow types and stripping out unneeded properties from the spec.

No need any more for a build step for the esm version.

[HarelM]

If there's anything we can help with, please ping me as I'm the lead maintainer for maplibre-gl-js and maplibre-style-spec for the js part of it.
Any help with PRs and maintenance would be very much welcome.
I'm also maintaining (on my free time) Maputnik, which has a way to switch to open-layer renderer, any help there would also be much appreciated. This tool is a good way to test things for maplibre-gl-js, I guess the same is true for this package as well.

[ahocevar]

Thanks for your offer, @HarelM. Much appreciated. Not sure I'll be able to help much with what you're asking for though - I have a bunch of packages to maintain myself, and doing this all in my free time.