[OSM-talk] Potlatch and the evil semicolons

[Dermot McNally]

2008/5/27 Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>:

> Well, I really, really dislike UIs that pop up an alert saying "You've
> just done something wrong which you don't understand. It needs fixing.
> Would you like to do something (a) you don't understand, or something
> else (b) you don't understand either?". Besides, modal dialogues like
> that break up your workflow - you'd be perfectly justified in wanting
> to go back later to fix it, for example.

Fair enough so far.

> So I'm a bit loth to do it the JOSM way (hey, diversity is good). And
> Potlatch does, of course, recolour the way based on certain tags, so
> if you merge a highway=trunk (green) and highway=primary (red) it'll
> become grey, which is a visual indication of what's changed.

This begins to trouble me, though. If it's not valid to offer users
the choice between two things they don't understand, then it's also
not valid to silently convert ways to a broken state (one that neither
mapper nor anyone else understands). It _would_ be valid to refuse to
merge ways at all in the event of a conflict. Or to refuse to write
back changes if any unresolved conflicts remain.

That said, If we trust a mapper to tag a road as primary or secondary,
I can't honestly believe that they won't understand a warning of the
sort: You have merged two ways with different properties. Here's a
list of the different options, choose the one you want or enter a new
one.

> But what could work, I think, is putting a little indicator (perhaps
> an unhappy face, or an alert triangle, or something) in the tag to
> show that there's an error in it. Probably not quite as authoritarian
> as Maplint's not-in-map-features, but something to flag up common
> errors like this - and maybe there are more we should be looking for.

Would this prevent "broken" content from being uploaded? If not, I
think we'll still have a problem.

> Feel free to start a trac ticket so I don't forget. :)

Gladly, but let's understand the likely scope of the solution first.
Or the problem, if we think that's not clear.

Cheers,
Dermot

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