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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 08.03.2014 09:04, Stephan Knauss wrote:
> Looks like Ilya missed similar information. He recreated it from the
> changesets:
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2013-January/065897.html

The reasons that Ilya mentioned are still valid:

* If someone changes their user name, you cannot find out who they were
before
* While all their edits will show up in planet/history planet under the
new name, the name change will disconnect the history of forum and
help.osm.org participation; these systems will not know that the same
person who was called X yesterday is Y today.
* If you have bookmarked any page about a user - perhaps because you
know him to be a trouble maker, you're regularly checking their edits or
so - then your bookmarks will not work any more because they are always
keyed to the user name and not the ID

However this has nothing to do with the planet file or the full history
planet; in these files, there will only ever be one user name for one
user ID.

(It's a different thing if you keep your own planet file and update it
with diffs - then you might end up with different names for the same
user id. This is, BTW, a problem that Geofabrik downloads have - there
might be two different user names for the same user ID in these since
the downloads are built from a planet file with diffs applied.)

> 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).

Perhaps you parsed planet files that you amended with diffs yourself, or
Geofabrik downloads.

Bye
Frederik

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