[Talk-ca] Did I just find a potentially significant bug in JOSM?

Tue Mar 8 02:39:35 GMT 2011

Thats funny, because I submitted a bug just a few hours ago because the
latest (dev) build of Validator + JOSm wouldnt merge duplicate nodes on a
canvec boundary.. Anyways, clearly JOSM is a work in progress,

Russell

On 2011-03-07, at 6:23 PM, Samuel Longiaru <longiaru at shaw.ca> wrote:

No, if I highlight an unnamed way warning, and select it, the fix key is
grayed out.  That makes sense.

Sam L.

-----Original Message-----
*From*: Samuel Longiaru
<longiaru at shaw.ca<Samuel%20Longiaru%20%3clongiaru at shaw.ca%3e>
>
*To*: Dan Charrois <dan at syz.com <Dan%20Charrois%20%3cdan at syz.com%3e>>
*Cc*: Talk-CA OpenStreetMap
<talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<Talk-CA%20OpenStreetMap%20%3ctalk-ca at openstreetmap.org%3e>
>
*Subject*: Re: [Talk-ca] Did I just find a potentially significant bug in
JOSM?
*Date*: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:13:37 -0800

Dan...

Have to admit that I VERY rarely if ever use the fix button, and then only
after I've isolated the issue for a specific error or warning.  I do errors
first, then warnings.  But after each correction, I revalidate to refresh
the list. Maybe that's overkill, but it keeps the exceptions from being
thrown.  I think you're getting the exceptions because you've modified the
data, but have not updated the list.  Usually, I just highlight the specific
error or warning, hit the SELECT button, then the "3" key to go there.  I
fix it manually if I can, then re-validate.  Then move to the next issue.
I'm too much of a scaredy-cat to highlight a whole class of errors and let
JOSM fix them automatically.  Like I said, I'm not sure JOSM likes me.

I'll try selecting an unnamed way warning and "fixing" to see what happens.
If it removes the way.... well, that's certainly ONE way to fix it.

Sam L.

-----Original Message-----
*From*: Dan Charrois <dan at syz.com <Dan%20Charrois%20%3cdan at syz.com%3e>>
*To*: Talk-CA OpenStreetMap
<talk-ca at openstreetmap.org<Talk-CA%20OpenStreetMap%20%3ctalk-ca at openstreetmap.org%3e>
>
*Subject*: [Talk-ca] Did I just find a potentially significant bug in JOSM?
*Date*: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:42:09 -0700

I've spent the past several hours trying to find out out why some of
my edits resulted in some accidental road removals.  I think I've
found the problem, which seems to relate to an apparent bug in JOSM,
or at least a preference somewhere set to something unintuitive that I
haven't been able to find - as such, I thought it would be best to
communicate with the group to see if anyone's experienced this problem
before, or at least give a heads up as to what has been happening to
me in case it's inadvertently happening to others.

I downloaded an area around the Beaumont, Alberta region to try and
add some roads from Canvec that don't exist in OSM (roads which I
could have sworn I've added when I worked on the same area a month or
two ago).  I then saved this downloaded area, along with the changes I
made, to an .osm file in JOSM.  I ran the Validator which found a few
duplicate nodes and such.  Telling it to fix errors, it did its thing.
 And then, I clicked on "warnings" and told it to fix those.  Lo and
behold, some (though not all) of the roads I'd just added suddenly
disappeared.  Since validation was the last step in my process before
I uploaded the data, and I was often zoomed all the way out when I did
so, I hadn't noticed this happen before, but it probably had been
going on right before I uploaded my changes.  In particular, sometimes
I would replace lower quality OSM roads with better Canvec data, and
if JOSM was deleting some of those Canvec roads I'd added in its "fix
warnings" validation step,
 those original OSM roads would have disappeared without replacements.

I tried to isolate further exactly what it was doing, and at least in
this situation it looks like it may be related to unnamed ways.  I
have 41 unnamed ways in my data.  If I click on the "unnamed ways"
folder specifically in the "warnings" validation dialog, it doesn't
give me the option to fix them - it shouldn't, since it doesn't know
what to call them anyway.  But if I click on the parent (root) icon
just labelled "Warnings", the fix button is enabled, and I thought it
was just supposed to fix all the enclosed warnings in categories that
it is able to fix.  When I click to "fix" all warnings like this, in
the progress bar, I see that it spends some time "fixing" unnamed
ways.  And then those ways are gone when it's done.

I was using JOSM 3751, so I checked for updates and found that 3961
was available.  I've updated my JOSM to see if it's still an issue.
But now, when I do the "global" fix warnings on the data set, it gets
part way through, then consistently gives me an unexpected exception
(coding error).  When I dismiss that dialog, I find that those roads
have again been removed, so it seems as though this is still a
problem.  The unexpected exception isn't encouraging either.

I suppose that I can work around the problem by selectively choosing
"fix" in the validations warning area for each of the separate
categories, instead of doing them all at once.  Though now I'm unsure
as to whether or not there is still an underlying problem with fixing
warnings that may give rise to an inadvertent loss of data.  At the
very least, I wanted to make a posting about it so that others can be
warned away from having the same problems I have run into.

If anyone is interested in trying to duplicate the problems I'm
having, just let me know your email address and I can send you the
.osm file I'm working with (compressed, it's about 600 kB).  And of
course, if anyone has any ideas, or suggestions about something stupid
I'm doing, please let me know!

Dan
--
Syzygy Research & Technology
Box 83, Legal, AB  T0G 1L0 Canada
Phone: 780-961-2213

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