[talk-au] Cautionary tale for editing ABS ways

[James Livingston]

Hi all,

As I've just discovered, you need to have some care when editing  
anything that causes a change to a way with over 2000 nodes (e.g. a  
lot of the ABS boundaries).

NEVER under any circumstances let anything happen to you editor during  
the upload. You can't let JOSM crash, have network troubles while  
uploading from Potlatch or similar - pbviously you can't control that,  
but you're not allowed to let it happen anyway.


The problem stems from the fact that you can no longer add or modify  
ways to have >2k nodes, you need to split them in pieces. In my case I  
did something that would modify an ABS boundary so split it in half,  
but then something happened and my upload got stopped half way through  
splitting the way. The result is that the half staying in the existing  
way got kept, but the half being put into a new way didn't get added.

Unfortunately I can't just revert the way to get it back, because it's  
too large to re-save. You also can't revert the way and split it  
before saving because Potlatch doesn't support that, due to the  
process required being insanely complicated and it only being useful  
if you want to revert a >2k node way. As far as I can tell, JOSM  
doesn't support reverting ways and it wouldn't be likely to support  
this either.


So now I get to go and extract the old way from dumps and then re- 
upload it as a now way. You have been warned.