[Potlatch-dev] Suggestion for "lifecycle" tag - comments?

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:41 AM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> My first thought is to just have another couple of highway types ( a
> proposed highway and a highway under construction ) with a list of
> classifications in a choice input, and maybe some date inputs for when
> they are opening and so on.

My feeling is that "proposed" is really not a type of highway, and
that eventually this tagging scheme will be replaced by something a
little less idiosyncratic:

highway=tertiary
lifecycle=proposed

> That could all be done quite easily with
> the current map_features code, and more importantly, there would be no
> unnecessary UI for managing the lifecycle of the 99.999% of roads in
> OSM that are neither proposed nor under construction.

Ok, first, I don't think the UI would be different either way. All the
code would be happening behind the scenes, to make a simple UI: simply
an extra dropdown on a "misc" tab or something.

I think what you're proposing shapes the UI too much around the
underlying tagging scheme. And I don't think you could change from one
lifecycle stage to another through the Simple view.

For example, if you changed from

"Proposed road"
highway=proposed
proposed=tertiary

to "Road under construction", you'd actually get:
highway=construction
construction=tertiary
proposed=tertiary

Not to mention you'd need to duplicate all the road types for every
life cycle stage. You'd also need to add "proposed railway", "proposed
cycleway", "proposed foothpath", "proposed track", "proposed
bridleway", "proposed building", etc etc (and repeat for construction
etc). Pretty messy, no?

Steve