[OSM-talk] Xapi and version attribute

[Rob Reid]

Maarten Deen wrote the following on 07/05/2009 07:31:
> Is it possible that in the Xapi servers, the version attribute is only present 
> in nodes that have been changed after the 0.6 transition?
> If I download data from Xapi, it is missing in most nodes, except for those 
> edited after 2009-04-28 (in my dataset).
>   
See 80n's email to talk about it a couple of days ago
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-May/036563.html
> I think this is quite an important issue as the 0.6 api will not accept uploads 
> without a version.
>   
I'm not sure Xapi is your best source of data if you are planning on 
editing it and feeding  it back into the main api as there is no 
guarantee you are dealing with the latest data.
For example around the 5th May it was returning data from the 29th April 
and I could see it slowly catching up with each query I did over the 
next few days.
All the editing programs (except  maybe potlatch which has its own 
interface) go through the main api for this reason, I think Xapi is 
intended more for search and querying the data in a read-only way where 
having the guaranteed latest version is not so important.
Now that the api supports versions you may be safe since any edits you 
try where you don't have the current version will be rejected but if you 
were doing it pre-api 0.6 its possible you were reverting other peoples 
changes.

rcr