[OSM-talk] Long Ways and API 0.6

[MP]

>> In Czech republic there are many forests that does not fit into the
>> new limit.
>
> Then you have even today created something that is very difficult for
> mappers to handle. The thought of downloading the history of one of these
> ways... shudder!

Those forest were imported approximately August 2008 and it was not me
who imported them. They lived in the database hapily since them,
though I splitted few of them cause they were too big to comfortably
handle.

>> Splitting them is not exactly easy, as most of them are
>> multipolygons and you have to manually move inner parts between
>> multipolygon relations in JOSM (2000+ nodes forest usually have about
>> 20-100 inner parts).
>
> The advanced usage of the multipolygon relation allows you to have as many
> "outer" members as you want (see wiki page), so you can just split up your
> outer way and that's it. It probably isn't perfect in the renderers yet but
> I'm confident it will soon be.

Automatic multipolygon splitting, where inner parts will
_automatically_ move to correct half would make this relatively easy
problem to solve. Without that is is quite tedious and error-prone
work (it is easy to forget about one of the many inner parts when
splitting, creating sort of invalid multipolygon.). Any skilled coder
nearby?

> The existing ways will not be touched, but you will be unable to make even
> the tiniest change to a way (you will not be able to change tags or
> add/remove nodes) if the new version of the way would have more than 2000
> nodes.

There is some risk they'll stay there in that state for quite long
time if you won't be able to touch them. Especially those ways that
are difficult to split.

Martin