[Potlatch-dev] Ways with more than 2000 points

[Richard Fairhurst]

Craig Stanton wrote:
> The next problem is the 2000 point limit. The Pacific Crest Trail is
> 2600 miles long, and though it does cross with, and occasionally merge
> with other trails it is one long trail and there are plenty of times
> where it will exceed the 2000 point limit. The first length I'm
> uploading, which covers barely 120 miles has 3095 points and I really
> don't want to split it out there in the middle of the forest. Is there a
> method to produce a way large than 2000?

The 2000-node limit is hardwired into OSM. It's there for a reason - the 
longer that ways are, the more difficult it is for software to cope with 
them, as you found when Safari started squawking about slow scripts. 
There is no way around it and you shouldn't look for one!

There's no special significance attached in OSM to something being one 
way. It is absolutely expected that long routes will be split across 
lots of ways. For example, you need to do that every time there's a 
bridge, so that you can tag the relevant bit (and that bit only) with 
bridge=yes.

Similarly, if the Pacific Crest Trail does merge with other trails, you 
will need a separate way for each merged section, so that you can add 
each way to the appropriate route "relations". The relation is how you 
indicate that all these separate footpaths are part of the same 
waymarked trail.

It might be helpful for you to ask a couple of questions at 
http://help.osm.org/ , on the newbies at openstreetmap.org mailing list, or 
on IRC (http://irc.openstreetmap.org/) to get familiar with some of 
these basics. All are quite friendly (well, maybe not the mailing list 
:( ). This list is really a development list and we don't mind answering 
your Potlatch questions, but you might get a bit bemused by some of the 
more developery e-mails flying past!

> I've just double checked my GPX file and it it entirely one trk with
> only one trkseg. So I can't see why Potlatch cut it into so many
> ways, some of which were only a few dozen points, others had
> hundreds.

Potlatch automatically cuts a GPX track if there's a delay between 
trackpoints of 3 minutes. This is because some GPX-producing software 
concatenates different tracks within the same trkseg or trk.

cheers
Richard