[OSM-dev] 0.6 API clarifications and corrections

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu May 15 18:00:38 BST 2008


Hi,

> should it be as SVN in the way that the moment I touch an object in an
> open changeset, it is locked, so my changeset can be committed as an
> atom? 

Would be nice to have but totally unusable because everything would be 
constantly locked.

 > Or seen from the other side, how do you rollback "meshed" changesets?

A difficult question (but unrelated to the discussion whether or not to 
include details when retrieving a changeset).

It doesn't have to be a meshed changeset - even if you have a situation 
where A vandalises the database and B makes one or two manual changes 
afterwards, then the changeset created by A cannot be reverted in its 
entirety because first B's changes would have to be reverted...

My initial proposal had support for changeset reverts in the API. At the 
hack-a-thon we decided not to implement this *at this time*, instead 
just pass the info to clients (there might be special rollback clients - 
it doesn't have to be the editors!) and let them decide what to do. This 
doesn't mean that there will not be any rollback support in a future 
API, but on the whole, rollback is probably a complex thing that will 
often require user interaction ("rolling back changeset X will also 
destroy some more recent edits done by user Z, are you sure..." etc).

Bye
Frederik





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