[Rebuild] Progress update

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

An (overdue!) progress update for you.

As you will have read on this list, the test cases are essentially done. 
Of the 296 tests, only two (fairly minor ones) are failing. This is 
excellent news: it means the logic for the changeover is now complete. 
Huge thanks to everyone who's contributed to this.

Given people's constraints on time and the community's (understandable) 
desire for the redaction to get underway asap, at our OSMF board meeting 
on Monday, we resolved to employ a developer to work on applying this 
logic to the OSM database. The remaining steps are essentially: to 
identify and complete any missing code, including failing tests that 
absolutely need to be resolved before moving on, and any 'bridging' code 
to the API; to make sure that this will run successfully against an OSM 
database; and then to run it against the production database.

I'm really pleased to report that Andy Allan, who most of you will of 
course know, has agreed to take on this work and that he started on it 
today.

Dermot and I will be working as the "interface" between Andy and OSMF 
and, of course, the community. If you have any questions, suggestions, 
other things that end in -estions, do of course throw them here.

cheers
Richard