Fetch frequently updated resources instead of bundling them #4994
Description
iD bundles a few dependencies from other projects:
That means that sometimes these other projects will receive updates, but users of iD will not get to see the update until the next time I release a new version of iD.
It would be great if we can figure out a way to have the released iD on openstreetmap.org pull in more recent data from these other projects.
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I could do this today for osm-community-index. This is because that project has releases that follow semantic versioning and are published to npm. We could always fetch the "latest" patch version from the unpkg CDN and know that it shouldn't break anything. We could also fallback to loading a local version if for some reason the CDN doesn't respond.
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I could probably do this for name-suggestion-index, but it's a little more complicated because the data in that index needs some processing to turn the results into presets. So it would be, fetch the name suggestion file and then patch in the suggestion presets in the first few seconds while the user is using iD. It would be weird but might work.
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I can't do this for editor-layer-index unless we do Start versioning the repo and output osmlab/editor-layer-index#214
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I can't really update the translations, because these resources are linked to the current code in
masterbranch. However it's worth mentioning that if we do find a way to pull in a more recent community index, it would be useful to pull in the translations that go with it. It's complicated.
Update: Also this blog about fetching a bunch of small files is the way to go in modern HTTP/2 capable browsers.