[Tagging] Add some tag to identify disputed borders

[Paul Allen]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:24 PM Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I had originally though about calling it 2.0 or 2.5, but thought that may
> create issues!
>
> So, would aminn_level=2.5 work?
>

Depends if the database schema holds it as an integer or not.  That problem
also applies to
admin_level=-2 depending on whether the schema uses signed or insigned
integers for it.
Or it may be held as a string, in which case you could have
admin_level=2.717828 to deal with
disputes over the bridges in Königsberg.  And admin_level=3.14169265358979
for disputes
over pie.

But look at what you're trying to achieve with special values meaning
disputed.  So 2.5 (or -2) is the
same as 2 but disputed, 3.5 (or -3) is the same as 3 but disputed.  It's
cleaner for code in the
renderer and for code in editors (and wetware in humans) to just have
admin_level:disputed=yes (or some such) rather than give special meanings
to special values
of a number.

The days are long gone (thankfully) when programmers had to resort to
trickery like this to
squeeze, for example, a complete typesetting system into 64K of RAM.  These
days they go for
comprehensibility and maintainability over saving a few bytes here and
there.

And that's assuming a disputed flag doesn't cause more problems than it
solves: "No, that border
isn't disputed, we're absolutely certain it's right." says one of the
countries involved.  So now we
need a flag pointing out that one country disputes that it's a disputed
border...

-- 
Paul
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