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

[Adam Dunn]

Congratulations on filing a bug report Dan. For those interested,
http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/6087 would be the ticket in
question.

Adam

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 9:26 PM, Dan Charrois <dan at syz.com> wrote:
> Thanks Adam, and everyone else who responded to my message.  I'm glad to learn the bug is repeatable by others - that means I'm not going completely crazy.  Plus, it's nice to have a good understanding now why some of the ways I'd uploaded had mysteriously disappeared.
>
> I'm glad you were able to distill down the problem so succinctly.  validatorfail.osm shows off the bug well, and is much easier to follow what's going on.
>
> I'd apparently been lulled into trusting JOSM's ability to fix simple things like duplicate nodes a little too much.  It's definitely a time-saver when it works, but not if roads are lost in the process.  I'm hoping that a slightly revised procedure of fixing things just one category at a time (rather than at the top-level "Warnings" category) should be a good workaround.
>
> In the meantime, I agree that a bug report should definitely be filed about this.  At the very least, disabling top-level "fixes" would force people to go through category by category.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who has trusted (or will trust) that the top-level "fix" is a good way to reduce the manual workload.  Your validatorfail.osm file is a perfect example of how to reproduce the problem, and should probably be included with the bug report - I can definitely try to figure out how to submit the bug report to http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ if you're busy or no one else has yet, and you don't mind my including the file.  But as the person who really narrowed down the issue, the "honor" for reporting it (if there is such a thing) should be yours.. :-)
>
> In any case, those "blanket fixes" will be a thing of the past for me - I'm hoping that the category-by-category approach doesn't cause any issues.
>
> Other than this hiccup, I've found JOSM to be quite intuitive and reliable, though as was mentioned, it is a work in progress and likely always will be.  It's just a matter of finding where its specific weaknesses are, and then avoiding those.
>
> Dan
>