[Talk-us] Relation roles

[Richard Weait]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Nakor's tool for ... ?  Link?

> (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.

I'd expect that we need a much stronger argument in favour of removing
the additional information provided by the directional roles.  It is
dead simple to reverse the direction of a way and break your proposed
forward-role, while directional roles would be fine.