[josm-dev] Surveyor and LiveGPS - feedback

[Gervase Markham]

Today, I had a chance to use the LiveGPS and Surveyor plugins in anger, 
as I surveyed the area around my childhood home village of Morland.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=54.6112&lon=-2.6224&zoom=12&layers=B0FT

I have the following bugs to report; please let me know if this info 
needs to go elsewhere other than that list.

1) When you are surveying, you end up with two layers - a LiveGPS layer 
with all of the raw points, and a Surveyor layer with your annotations. 
This surveyor layer has points, plus the text and icons associated with 
those points.

It appears to be impossible to save this layer with the text intact, or 
to convert it into any sort of saveable layer (e.g. a data layer). You 
can save the points, but that isn't much help. This layer contains a lot 
of extremely important information.

2) I can only persuade JOSM to talk to gpsd if I start JOSM after gpsd; 
and it only connects once. If I disconnect, I am unable to connect again 
without restarting JOSM.

These two problems combined to bring the surveying to a halt after a 
couple of hours. I thoughtlessly disconnected JOSM from gpsd (by 
unticking the LiveGPS menu item "Capture GPS Track") and could not get 
it reconnected (bug 2). I could not restart JOSM because it would have 
lost two hours of annotations (bug 1). So we had to return home, making 
sure the laptop didn't die and JOSM didn't crash, and do all of the 
mapping in order to preserve the information. In fact, it did run out of 
memory and crash, but not before I'd done 95% of the mapping.

We got a lot done; however, it would have been a lot less hairy and more 
secure if these problems were not present. I am happy to do whatever is 
necessary to help debug them.

Also, with regard to the Surveyor plugin - in the end, it seemed far 
easier just to make annotations, without the different possible types 
and "node presets". So I basically covered my map with annotations like 
"Stop sign - church", "Stop sign - dual carriageway begins here" and so 
on. :-) The ability to annotate the track is invaluable. The ability to 
annotate it in structured ways seems, to me, to be superfluous.

Gerv