[Talk-us] Relation roles

[Nathan Edgars II]

I've started using forward/backward roles rather than 
north/south/east/west on relations for state highways, due to JOSM's 
relation editor supporting sorting by them and Nakor's tool (which was 
already less convenient, given that you had to upload to OSM and get the 
relation number) being down. I've been leaving U.S. Highways alone 
(Interstates don't matter either way because they're almost always dual 
carriageway), but this means that there's no way to check for 
completeness of a relation.

How much uproar would there be if I started changing to forward/backward 
roles in conjunction with checking for completeness? Is there any 
benefit to the slightly increased amount of information provided by the 
directional roles? Are there any other solutions? It appears from 
http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/5109 that the JOSM devs are not 
interested in supporting directional roles.