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

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

One thing I found unfortunate is that when we switched to API 0.6 to
support changeset comments we also limited the length of values to 255
characters.

    So because of that you end up with really long run-on sentences
like that to describe large changes making it hard to write them and
to understand them.

It would be much nicer if I could

    Write a short summary of the changes I'm making, like this.

    Then go on to elaborate a bit on what I did, why I did it, and
    what sources I used etc. Perhaps explaining how I'm not really
    sure about that one track by the sports stadium, due to the bad
    GPS reception I had there.

Sometimes my changes in Git turn into little mini blog-posts about the
problem I was solving, it's unfortunate that I can't provide similar
details on OpenStreetMap, at least it's 255 characters, not 255 bytes
like on Wikipedia.

Anyway, since we're making pleas, here's one of my own:

Can the maintainers of JOSM please get rid of the silly feature that
makes changeset comments manditory? It results in a lot of garbage like
the "...", "some mapping", "fixed stuff", or "none of your business"
examples which Frederik cited.

I'd rather have history with no comments at all than expending mental
energy on comments that look like they were copy/pasted from
http://whatthecommit.com.