[Talk-us] Highway Tagging Consensus to Improve OSM (and address some of 41 latitude's concerns)

[Nathan Edgars II]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 8:15 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Ways and relations are equally easy to "break"
>>
>> Nope. They're not, because relation membership is not a tag on the
>> way.
>
> Yes, they are, because a relation membership and new way (with new tags and
> node refs) are both completely separate new entities that need to be
> uploaded. If an editor can reliably do it with a new way then it can also
> reliably do it with a new relation member.

When a way is downloaded from the API, its tags are all downloaded,
but a separate API query has to be sent to get any referring
relations.
>
>>
>> A way is always uploaded with its tags,
>
> Yes, but the new (split) way is not necessarily always uploaded.

Relations are uploaded after new ways to avoid precondition failures.
Thus it's much more likely that a connection will fail between the way
and the relation than between two ways. I've seen Potlatch take
several tries to upload a large relation, which compounds the possible
problem. It's also obvious from the map when a portion of a way is
accidentally deleted, but even if relations were used to render
shields an error would not always be obvious.

I have seen these problems in my work on repairing relations. Do you
have any such experience?