[OSM-dev] created_by considered harmfull

[Raphael Studer]

On 8/9/07, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > For the non-advantage that created_by brings, it is rather costly.
>
> You are right in everything you say, but you forget that created_by
> helps us to find problems with certain editors. So it doesn't have
> *no* value at all ;-)
>
> > So here is my proposal with the most immediate action first
> > 1. all authors of editor software stop adding created_by tags to
> > new nodes
> > in their next release
> > 2. all authors of editor software silently surpress the created_by
> > tags
> > when uploading edits to existing map features in their next release
> > 3. optionally we run a query on the database to delete all existing
> > created_by tags.
>
> I don't think the problem is so pressing to call for such drastic
> measures. I would like to repeat a suggestion I've made in the past:
>
> * Change our data model at the API so that instead of every record
> having a last-modified timestamp and a user id, every record only has
> one "changeset id"
> * Create a new table "changesets" that stores user id, timestamp,
> editor type and version, plus an optional "commit message"
> * Initially, auto-generate one changeset entry for each change that
> is committed, but step by step migrate to a solution where editors
> can issue a "create changeset" call (with optional commit messages)
> which gives them an unique id and have them upload every change
> referencing that changeset id

What's about an API extension allows to select output format?
Maybe one is OSM XML the other OSM JSON (javascript object notation).

Regards