[OSM-dev] 0.6 api - one more time

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Christopher Schmidt
<crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:
>  So, one thing that I would like to question is whether we really need to
>  break backwars compatibility for this change at all.
>
>  Based on my reading, there is only one aspect of the changes in the API
>  that forces backwards incompabitibility: the requirement for the client
>  to generate a changeset before uploading and provide that changeset
>  identifier.

Well, that and the fact they need to provide version numbers. True,
you could say that if a version number isn't provided, just assume it
matches. How long would we tolerate that?

>  Now, based on my reading of this, (which could be wrong), if that's the
>  only change, there is a way to simply allow 0.5 API clients continue to
>  work: If a changeset identifier is not provided, then create a changeset
>  automatically.

What about the commit message? And what about the idea of moving the
created_by to the changeset?

We agreed it could be done, but would it be worth it?

FWIW, the JOSM changes are such that we could deploy the changes in
the client before the API change and no-one would notice.

>  If my reading is correct, allowing backwards compatibility would be
>  fairly easy, codewise. It would be my hope that this would allow for
>  easier transitioning for things like JOSM-in-Debian: it would allow
>  backported versions of JOSM to filter in and fill the need of allowing
>  changesets without breaking the existing installed editor base.

It's mostly server-side coding. alternativly you could probably write
a proxy that mapped 0.5 to 0.6. But I wonder where you would magic a
commit message from...

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/