[OSM-talk] The future of bugs in OSM

SteveC steve at asklater.com
Thu Jul 2 13:16:12 BST 2009


On 1 Jul 2009, at 19:58, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Hi,
>
> SteveC wrote:
>> But, and this is key, it also has a RESTful API for mass uploading  
>> of  bugs.
>> We need to do two things - unify the various bug systems and  
>> expose  more of the bugs.
>
> I believe that the types of bugs one can look for are quite  
> different. You'd have to build a very good system if it is to be  
> able to capture all kinds of bugs - don't think that simply having  
> something like lat/lon/text is enough, because some bugs might be  
> relevant for a whole area, or you might have a "two nearby streets  
> share the same name" bug which points to two ways rather than one  
> location, etc etc

How about we borrow tags from OSM? Bugs have lat,lng,text and keyvals?  
What you think?

They main thing I want to say though - is lets just build something  
simple and iterate. Absolutle minimum feature set is a RESTful API  
plus a OSB-like interface.

> Not saying it can't be done but if you want to replace the various  
> bug systems then you need to be able to do what they can do or it is  
> a step backwards.
>
> I'm also wary of the centralistic "let's set up a database and have  
> everyone upload their data to us" approach. Maybe keeping true to  
> your "clearinghouse" idea the central service should *only* know  
> that there is some other service that has found a bug in a certain  
> location, and when the user wants to know more, the other service is  
> interrogated through an API. The other service might, for example,  
> guide the user through an automatic fixing process for certain types  
> of bugs, or offer things like "find similar bugs in the vicinity" or  
> so. Plus, every coder could contribute to something like that in the  
> language(s) he prefers, and without having to ask for his  
> functionality to be included in some central service.

Yeah so if you want it to just also aggregate things like keepright or  
OSB, it's easy to write things to do that, so long as they have APIs.

Best

Steve





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