[OSM-dev] Grumble, grumble

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ed Loach wrote:
> I think, and I can't be certain, that I've lost a whole evening's
> editing, just because one way I deleted in JOSM had already been
> deleted by other means before I came to upload. Surely that shouldn't
> be a problem that loses all the other changes which were unrelated?

JOSM uses diff uploads, where either the whole upload works or the whole 
upload fails.

What *should* happen in a case like yours:

1. you hit upload
2. upload fails, JOSM complains
3. if you try to exit JOSM, it should warn about unsaved changes
4. you must now do a download and resolve any conflicts
5. you hit upload again
6. it works

Unfortunately, step "4" will not send you deleted objects, so JOSM has 
no way of knowing that the object has already been deleted. It could, 
however, better evaluate the return value of step "2" to at least find 
out that a certain way is giving trouble and maybe offer to leave that 
out of the upload or so.

Currently the only way to deal with this situation is to save the file 
in JOSM and then manually remove the "action=delete" attribute from the 
way in question, before opening the file again and uploading it. There 
is also a config option osm-server.atomic-upload=false that you can set 
to make JOSM upload each object individually, which in your case would 
have meant that some changes would at least have been stored.

I know this is very unsatisfactory and a fix is being worked on, but not 
ready yet.

> I say "I can't be certain", but none of the edits I've made show up
> in Potlatch. 

You can use the changeset browser on the openstreetmap.org site to find 
out if a changeset has been created at the time in question and whether 
it contains anything.

Bye
Frederik

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