[OSM-dev] Reverts from the woodpeck_repair account

Paweł Paprota ppawel at fastmail.fm
Wed Jan 2 13:55:55 GMT 2013


On 01/02/2013 02:44 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 01/02/2013 02:31 PM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
>> For me such reverts just introduce unneeded clutter in the history
>> database - thousands of new versions in the history.
>
> Yes, that's sad, and I'd surely prefer not having to do such reverts in
> the first place.
>
> But what do you suggest? If someone makes a mass edit without discussing
> it with anybody, in blatant violation of our guidelines, simply shrug
> and ignore it?
>

Not ignore it - for sure there needs to be a conversation with the 
author of the original changeset so that it is clear that such large 
changes should not happen without consultation.

What I meant by my message is that we seem to be shooting ourselves in 
the foot in pursuit of "free tagging", "no rules" etc. Note that I'm not 
willing to discuss this at length as every discussion about this topic 
seems to lead to nowhere. I would like to keep this thread to one (or 
couple of) specific example(s) that I mentioned.

In this specific case, what is the value of reverting other than making 
a point that people should not be doing such edits? Is the value greater 
than the cost paid in the long term by polluting the database and 
potentially discouraging people from editing like this in the future?

As for the tagging related points you mentioned - I unsubscribed from 
tagging@ about a week after subscribing to it... Ultimately there should 
be no cases like this where there are huge changesets which basically 
bring no value at all to the project and just change syntax sugar (tags).

How to do it? Well, that's a challenge, I have some ideas and am willing 
to do development but for now I want to finish with OWL and better 
history tab which is equally important topic...

Paweł




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