[OSM-dev] Data corruption :) II

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Tom Hughes wrote:
> Because we will be moving servers we will in fact probably be able to 
> keep the site running in read only mode on the old server during the 
> move, although it may be that we decide it is not a good idea to do so 
> as it might lead to people having offline edits in 0.5 format which 
> would be hard to upload after the change.

Good point.

If it turns out that the "read-only time" we expect is significant, then 
I could perhaps write a perl script that allows users to (try and) 
upload their 0.5 saved edits to 0.6 by first requesting all objects that 
were touched from the new API, comparing the timestamps to what's in the 
file and assuming that if timestamp is unchanged they had the correct 
version, and augmenting the file with version numbers. Or build this 
mechanism directly into JOSM so that when you re-download an area it 
will simply add in the version numbers.

Alternatively, we could switch from 0.5 to 0.5.1 tomorrow, with the only 
change being newly introduced version numbers in the XML. That would 
probably make the saved changes 0.6 compatible then. It might break a 
few applications if we do this but only those who don't do proper XML 
parsing and people who write them are asking for trouble anyway. *

Bye
Frederik

*) Quick check of my many regex-based OSM scripts shows that most of the
    regexes are sophisticated enough to withstand the sudden 
introduction
    of new attributes ;-)

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"