[OSM-talk] Potlach problem?

[David Earl]

I was following up why I was getting some ways reported as being at 
lat=0 lon=0 in the name finder processing for this week's planet file, 
when they weren't actually there (this is different to the various nodes 
and segments that actually *are* in the mid Atlantic). The reason 
appears to be that I wasn't finding a node for the segments of the way, 
and I wasn't checking properly for that.

However, this begs the question how ways and segments are still getting 
into the database without the nodes the segments refer to.

One example is 'Southlands Shopping Centre' (which a bit of research 
suggests might be in Regina, Canada, though there's nothing in the OSM 
data to confirm that).

I grepped the planet file and found it. It reports created_by='Potlatch 
alpha' and has quite a few segments, from which I chose "27811754" at 
random; grepping for that I get
   <segment id="27811754" from="31657145" to="31657146"
     timestamp="2007-07-11T06:46:24+01:00"/>
(no created_by, and since JOSM generally puts one in, I assume it wasn't 
created by JOSM), and from that I grepped for 31657145, the first node 
reference, and found that this is not in the planet file.

Of course this combination of segments and nodes may have been modified 
later, but the smoking gun in the file is 'Potlach alpha'.

Sorry if you already know about this.

David