[OSM-talk] A plea for meaning ful changeset comments

[James Livingston]

On 30/07/2010, at 9:52 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> For me, very frequently, the changeset just represents a random bunch
> of edits I happened to be doing at one time, with not much cohesion.
> There are different suburbs all in the same changeset as I flitted
> about.

My editing falls into two categories, casual editing and big tasks. I think I put in reasonable comments for big tasks (my current one is uploading National Parks data).

For casual editing, I'm not sure what I could put in that would be useful. Often I start off adding some street numbers I've collected, and then trace those houses from nearmap, and then start tracing a creek, and then start doing something when that ends. When I set the changeset comment, I don't know exactly what I'll be fixing up - I know the location, but you can get that from the changeset anyway without any comment.


For any kind of semi-automatic or large scale things, I agree that good changeset comments shouldn't be difficult to write and would be very useful, but I'm not sure about small-scale editing when you go along with things.

-- 
James