[josm-dev] Best practice: offline mapping?

[Shaun McDonald]

On 26 Oct 2009, at 16:14, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 1:30 PM,  <stefan at binaervarianz.de> wrote:
>> As I have a netbook with me which could run JOSM, I could edit live  
>> or at
>> least at the end of each day. This would keep the frustration level  
>> low.
>> But here is why I ask this here too (and not only in my openstreetmap
>> diary): Is it possible to download the osm data for my travel region
>> beforhand,
>> make edits to it (or to a new layer), and than merge these data  
>> back into
>> the (possible changed over time) osm data on the server?
>>
>> Is the conflict resolution/checking engine usable to actually fix the
>> conflicts, or is it just that it tells me 'forget it'?
>
> Well where are you traveling to? Unless it's a heavily edited OSM area
> you're unlikely to get any conflicts at all. And JOSM has some very
> nice "upload selection" features and conflict resolution in more
> recent versions which should make uploading back very easy indeed.
>
> You can download the data for your region in advance e.g. here:
> http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/
>
> If I was doing this I'd have the .osm file I was working on in some
> version control system while working on it. Git is very good for this
> purpose but you may be familiar with others that could suit you
> better.
>

I'm cringing at the thought of trying loading a large extract into  
JOSM and expecting it to be able to work quite happily. I would never  
want to try and work with large areas in JOSM at any time in a desktop  
or laptop with 4GB of RAM, never mind on a netbook. What is the point  
of storing the osm data in a version control system? If I was  
desperate I would download a small group of towns/villages before  
hand, and then use the update data when I'm online, especially just  
before uploading.

Shaun