[Tagging] default value for "oneway"

[Xavier Noria]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:

> In any case there are roughly 45 million highway segments on which a
> oneway tag could make sense, vs. roughly 6 million oneway=yes and 1.5
> million oneway=no. I suspect that it is really -far- too late to change
> the semantics of this specific attribute.

Since nowadays NULL for a street means oneway=no a change in the
semantics would be still be possible as far as the database is
concerned. If you go today to the database and update all oneway
attributes for streets which are blank to "no", the meaning of the
database is equivalent.

Same for motorways, replace all NULLs with "yes". Equivalent database.

For a street, there is no practical difference nowadays between "no"
and "unset", which is a smell for me. Either way means no.

I believe the default is useful for the UI, to preselect a value for
example so that the user has to do nothing in the majority of street
creations, less useful as a way to interpret NULLs because then you
don't know what has been confirmed.