[josm-dev] Integrating notes into JOSM core

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014, Toby Murray wrote:

> My eventual vision is that instead of the download-as-you-pan nonsense,
> Notes will be listed as a checkbox alongside "OpenStreetMap Data" and "Raw
> GPS Data" checkboxes in the download dialog. But this checkbox can not be
> added by a plugin so this weekend I decided to take a look at how things
> might fit into core.

We always offered to integrate patches for JOSM core which make life 
easier and we'd like to have that functionality in core. But I don't 
remember many such requests till now although some tickets suggest there 
is potential.

> not the case. But in order to make it easy for people to see what I have so
> far, I have forked the JOSM git mirror on GitHub and am pushing changes
> there. When things are done we can work on porting the changes to SVN.

That actually is not a very good way. Nobody likes to accept larger blobs 
of changes and we don't do that as well. If you have proper change 
requests, make a patch and a ticket for it and when sensible it will be 
integrated. Doing larger changes first and at the end thinking about an 
integration is a good road for failure.

> Depending on time constraints, I am thinking this might actually end up
> being a multi-step process. The back-end API interactions could be
> integrated into core first and the notes plugin could switch to using core
> for those functions before any GUI changes are introduced in core.

If it already works this way, then also do it this way and not in a fork 
of the codebase (which does not mean you cannot use the git mirror, but be 
aware, that your changes there should find their way back to the core SVN 
instead of accumulating). In principle we also accept a small amount of 
code which is not directly necessary for core function and what we always 
accept whe needed are changes which make plugin functions possible (i.e. 
switches from private to public or new interface functions instead of 
variables).

> Next I need to look at how to integrate the API interactions into core. I'm
> still trying to understand the interactions between OsmApi,
> BoundingBoxDownloadeer, OsmServerReader and the Download*Task classes so
> I'm not quite sure in what direction I'm headed on that yet. Suggestions
> are of course welcome :)

Do task-by-task (i.e. ticket by ticket) requests in these cases. Propose a 
fix (and a description WHY) and see what the result will be. It will not 
always be what you expect, but it will solve the issue at hand.

All together - it is fine you want to get that into core and it will be 
smooth if you try continuous integration.

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