[OSM-dev] Feature Request for Potlatch

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Sat Sep 29 10:51:02 BST 2007


Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany) wrote:

> Speaking of Potlatch, i would have a great great feature wish.  
> Could you
> enable potlatch users to see all segments. Even those not wayed  
> yet. I'm
> sitting here since more than 10 hours (and I'm not finished yet)  
> wasting my
> time just correcting a lot of streets one or more potlatch(Alpha)   
> users
> where drawing on top of existing segments. The bad thing is that  
> the potlatch
> ways seem to be drawn vague from whatever(Satelite, ...) So the  
> quality of
> the ways is really worse. I would hope that these people would use the
> existing segments if they could see them. Or would it be worth  
> creating ways
> with highway=unknown, so these people at least could see that they are
> currently destroying already existing work?

Potlatch lets you see unwayed segments by turning on the option in  
the prefs - they then appear when you load GPS tracks. (A further  
option lets you automatically convert runs of unwayed segments to  
ways, a bit like the JOSM tways plugin.)

I've always refrained from having this as a default option because  
both the query and the relevant line-drawing routine were  
comparatively slow, and it would have therefore caused performance  
issues on the server. These days, with quadtiles, that wouldn't be so  
much of a deal. But given that segments are being turned into ways in  
a week's time, I don't think there's much point in making the change  
this late on.

For what it's worth I've been using Potlatch a lot to "way" unwayed  
segments in the last week. Sometimes yes, I find the situation you  
describe. But fairly often I've also found appallingly rough lines  
drawn in unwayed segments. I'm not sure that any approach or editor  
magically gives you precisely drawn ways[1], it's usually more down  
to an individual mapper.

cheers
Richard

[1] though Potlatch's new "convert and simplify from GPS" option is  
pretty good ;)




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