[OSM-dev] historical user names in full history dump

[Stephan Knauss]

On 07.03.2014 23:38, Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 07/03/14 22:12, Stephan Knauss wrote:
>
>> I noticed that in the full history dump the user names associated with a
>> specific version does not match with the username which was active at
>> that time.
>
> Well as we have no record of what the username was at the time of the
> edit I'm not sure what else you would expect us to do?

Looks like Ilya missed similar information. He recreated it from the 
changesets:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2013-January/065897.html

What makes me wonder: The API .../history call also returns only the 
current user name.
This is in contrast to the problem Ilya described.
I'm also certain that before the license change I had code to deal with 
changed usernames when parsing planet files (regular, not full history).

So it sounds a bit someone thought about it and it's an intentional 
decision to treat the display_name volatile.
Was the API internals changed to use the uid more often instead of the 
display_name?

Is the problem described by Ilya maybe solved already? Will all data 
coming from the API and in current dumps have only the latest 
display_name set, so uid to name is a 1:1 relation?

Then I agree, having a history of display_names has little practical use.

Stephan