[OSM-dev] Quick History Service

[Frederik Ramm]

Dermot,

On 04/24/2011 02:19 AM, Dermot McNally wrote:
> I see that user names are not provided. Is that for reasons of
> discretion, volatility or performance?

Two reasons: 1. There's really no elegant mechanism to handle user name 
changes. An object may have been edited by you while your user name was 
something else. If you change your user name but don't edit anything, 
there is no chance for my application to find out about that change 
through the diffs it consumes; what my application shows would be out of 
sync with what the API proper gives you (as the API knows about the user 
name change but I do not). 2. It would increase the size of the return 
messages by something like 20%.

Both are however not really strong reasons and I could provide user 
names if these problems are deemed unimportant.

Bye
Frederik