[OSM-talk] Long Ways and API 0.6

Ben Laenen benlaenen at gmail.com
Sun Feb 8 19:05:56 GMT 2009


On Sunday 08 February 2009, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ben Laenen wrote:
> > OK, as long as there's no limit on the number of relation members,
> > I'm happy :-)
>
> I'm pretty sure there will be, it is not implemented yet but I
> believe we said it would be 1.000. Relations with more members become
> very hard to work with.


And why is that? We cannot just split relations. I thought it was the 
whole purpose of relations to have everything together.

So I guess you then propose something like a "super-relation". But 
that's not exactly user friendly: suppose I started tagging a 200 km 
long walking route from two opposite sides and work toward each other. 
So they now suddenly realize that you reached 1000 ways and haven't 
closed the gap in between. So now you'd have to add a new relation 
between those two parts to be able to finish the route? And too bad if 
you've reached 1000 ways in one relation and need to split a way up 
into two. I don't think there are any tools normal users can work with 
to completely reorganize relations.

Furthermore, relations into relations are usually completely unsupported 
at all (renderers or editors).


If the API really cannot work well with big relations, improve the API 
then. That's the whole point of having a new API, right? But adding 
such a limit just because the API doesn't really like it sounds 
like "when I drive backwards with my car, the engine makes funny 
noises, so I fixed it by not allowing the gear handle to be put into 
reverse, thus eliminating all the funny noises problems".

Ben




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