[Openstreetmap-dev] Re: [Openstreetmap] osm-editor update

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,

>>This will not work if two people edit at the same time.  If I was
>>going to implement this I would do the changes locally and then
>>download the current state and merge the changes before uploading.
>
> Sounds very nasty :-)

Indeed, it IS nasty. :-)

Luckily we have another mechanism to prevent (or better: revert) conflicts
in OSM: The idea of a self correcting wiki.


> Given your comments I think I'll make OSM data "read only" (used for
> reference if you are adding brand new data) unless you're in live update
> mode.

Even for adding, you cannot restrict the user in add in areas where other
people also put in the same (logical) data.

I think it is even impossible to detect that an user added data was
already added by another person. All we (offline editor writers) can do is
provide simple and good features to merge together two accidential added
streets, nodes or lines.


Another approach could be to lock specific bounding boxes for editing.
However, I dislike this idea, since it introduce many complex things like
stale locks or even the detection of the bounding box the user want to
edit (I don't want the user to have to specify the area in which he want
to edit something beforehand editing.)

And the hope is, that we don't have many conflicts anyway, like there are
surprisingly few conflicts when editing wiki pages.


Ciao, Imi.