[josm-dev] Another 66 relations bite the dust

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Mon, 10 May 2010, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

> The created_by is JOSM 1.5 (3094 en). This roughly echoes:

JOSM 3094 is no longer current. It's 2 months old. Newer tested versions 
with many bugfixes are 3 weeks old. This is plenty of time for updating.

I'm pretty sure we fixed that bug, but as it is not reproducable anymore 
we can't be sure.

> Deleting a relation with 900ish members is almost always going to be an
> error. Obviously we don't yet know what's happened here, but I think we
> can safely assume that the user wasn't presented with a dialogue reading
> "Are you really really sure you want to delete an entire chuffing cycle
> route along 900 roads?" and a button "HELL YES!".

We display a "this is what you do" before each upload. Separated in 
add/modify/delete sections. Especially the delete section should always 
be inspected critical. Lots of efforts have been put into presenting this 
information in a way, so that users have a good chance to understand it.

> As per the first cited message, I don't want to get into an editor
> argument here, but I do know from bitter experience that if Potlatch let
> you do this without realising, there would have been people screaming
> for my head for months now.

Well, Potlatch deleted every German name in Saxonia for one user when he 
entered the Sorbian names. Was a lot of work to fix this as well (as he 
did do multiple changesets). I still found two missing ones yesterday, 
after nearly half a year.

This was probably as well an error which was fixed inbetween and never 
reported. These things happen.

> Could I entreat the JOSM developers to put some serious effort into
> identifying and fixing this at the very earliest opportunity?

I don't see any sense in trying to fix an unreproducable and very likely 
already fixed issue.

I can't force people to use newer josm version. We have still a large 
number of old version (6 to 12 months old) floating around.

If this is really an issue, then maybe the API should block older versions 
known to cause trouble as it already did in the past.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)