[josm-dev] Better History

[Matt Amos]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Igor Shubovych wrote:
>> This demands completely changing of the OSM API.
>> I only think if it is good idea to change the whole protocol just to make
>> history more clear.
>
> No, I wasn't suggesting any API change. I said:
>
>> 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.

0.7 anyone? better start planning it now if we want to release before
the london olympics ;-)

> and then suggested that we could make the client upload detailed
> information about what it did.
<snip>
> All without API changes.

but with some editor support. e.g: if $EDITOR undeletes the way, it
needs to know that the "merged" tag should be cleared.

i think there is a more general mechanism that we might consider
adding to the API. presently (well, in 0.6) each object modified or
deleted must reference a previous version of the same object. we could
add in optional (id,version) reference to a different parent object,
default null, which would allow a checked, FK relationship.

this would, imho, be a better way of dealing with splitting and
merging than explicit split and merge RPCs. more RESTful :-)

(although i have been looking at the webdav specs and wondering if
MOVE and COPY might be useful methods. we would have to work on basic
HTTP compliance first, though)

cheers,

matt