5.0 Notes for the power users

[DanRunfola]

Just dropping a few notes here as I finalize 5.0. With luck, it will be pushed in about an hour (pending my new github push script working, which needs to iterate through about 2500 commits :) ).

1 - I have combined our source fields into one, comma delimited field. No more source-1 and source-2. This is primarily due to the need to be able to flexibly add more sources, and the enumerated system simply broke down. I recognize this will be breaking on the API, so apologize in advance :( (NOTE: you can still use the /v4/ endpoint of the API if you need the old system while you update).

2 - I have added more metadata into the meta.txt file, specificially the number of ADM units, and more details on how to cite gB.

3 - I am temporarily disabling the actions on the repo while I get 5.0 up, as otherwise I will receive around 5k emails :). This means that the bot will be sleeping until ~tomorrow for any PRs.

4 - The new build is now able to run both locally or via git actions. This is bringing build times from ~a day (GH actions) to around ~30 minutes (local on ~500 cores), mostly due to limitations in how I was managing the database in GH actions (i.e., gB is by design backend-less, so the repo IS the database, which limits how you can commit from multiple nodes simultanesouly. Local builds "solve" this, as I can commit flexibly across subsets of the dataset as it's updated).

5 - CGAZ is, I think, "fixed". I plan on revisiting CGAZ very soon to start adding in some oft-requested features, especially re: GADM-like hierarchical information.

6 - We now have a longer boundary hash identifier, to avoid collision issues a few of you noted in France and India.

A bunch of other updates as well, but the above are a little poorly documented right now (also working on a new website), so wanted to jot it down somewhere.

[DanRunfola]

Other notes as I wrap things up - may respond a few times here.

I am removing the cross-linkages in the API between gbOpen and gbAuth/gbHum.

I.e., previously you could make a call to /api/current/gbOpen/USA/ADM0/ , and that call would include a sub-object if (for example) there was an authoritative option available. This was oddly incongruous with both our documentation and goals, as it could lead to confusion of users re: what boundary they were receiving. Now, these calls will all only ever return one type of data. In the future, we may want to create a new endpoint that reveals all available boundaries across the three types.

[DanRunfola]

Alright, I have just flipped the switch for 5.0. It's about 50% uploaded now, and I expect it will finish up in about 1 hour. API updates are also beign pushed, and because they're lighter weight there may be some brief disconnects between the API state and the database state for this launch over the next hour or so. In the future this won't be an issue, just this round because I don't have the website linked to the new build routines (yet).

Looking forward to issues popping in :)