[josm-dev] Better History

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Mar 20 18:22:09 GMT 2009


Hi,

    sometimes it is difficult to see from the history of an object what 
has happened.

For example, you may look at the history of one way and it looks like 
user X has deleted the way, but instead user X has merged the way with 
another, existing way. (Similar for splitting ways.)

Ideally of course, the API would support such complex operations (so you 
could call an API function "split way" and it would be recorded in 
history as such). But this is not going to happen any time soon.

I wonder if we should make an effort to better record such things 
through the existing history. For example, wehn merging two ways, 
instead of just deleting one of them, should we perhaps first upload a 
new version of it that has no nodes and just one tag ("note=merged with 
way #1234"), and then immediately delete it afterwards? This would make 
it so much clearer what happened to someone reading the history. Maybe 
we could even formalise this somehow.

I know it is not strictly a JOSM issue and ideally all editors would 
support this, but you have to start somewhere.

Bye
Frederik

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




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