[Tagging] Proposal: Sunset ref=* on ways in favor of relations

[David Earl]

I can see the attraction of this, but I do always worry about gross lack of
backward compatibility being a huge barrier to adoption. If you have to
scramble to keep up with changes like this whenever they happen, you aren't
going to be keen to be a consumer of OSM data when it's only peripheral to
what you're trying to do. I hear all the arguments about being able to move
forward and so on, but if you can't keep the customers, there's no point.

Also relations are a massively bigger burden on a consumer. Every time you
get one you've got to do a look up in a potentially HUGE mass of other
data, so it probably has to be done via a database rather than in memory.
Getting the information you need becomes orders of magnitude slower for
every object.

It also doesn't help that relations appear last in the OSM data, so you
can't even note the relations as you go and then look them up as you see
ways etc. You have to process the lot first and then go back and to the
original task. Again it pretty much mandates a huge database for anything
other than a small area.

David
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