[OSM-dev] OSM Wishlist

[Stephan Knauss]

Serge Wroclawski writes: 

> This is expensive.
does this matter? Is there a requirement to have it running against the 
latest r/w api? 

I fetch my osm data for editing from the osm ro-mirror (overpass). This is 
a lot faster than waiting for main API. Works fine as well.
Why not add another (or a 3rd, 4th, ...) ro-mirror for these special tasks. 
load can be distributed quite easy onto different servers.
Could even be a database made specifically for these history calls. Just 
preprocess the geometry. 

And if it must be working with the latest revision because the data is 
newer than a few minutes then the API could query this service and in case 
it's not available there only then doing the expensive calls. 

I once thought of implementing something like this. I think Peter already 
has a prototype doing similar.
https://github.com/MaZderMind/OpenStreetMap-History-API 

Stephan