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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> 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.

It's a two-sided thing. Yes, making it mandatory causes some people to 
enter stupid things. However, if it is optional then some people who 
would otherwise be willing and able to enter a meaningful comment might 
think that it doesn't matter whether the enter one or not!

Someone else said that JOSM was by default re-using the same message as 
last time; I think that's the first thing that needs to go (maybe only 
do that if the last commit was less than 24hrs ago).

I could imagine dropping the mandatory changeset comment, but when left 
empty, display a pop-up that explains why changeset comments are 
important and ask the user to reconsider. (Indeed that dialog could be 
shown whenever the changeset comment is less than 15 characters or so.) 
And of course that dialog must not have a "don't ask me again" feature.

I agree that someone who wants to be a jerk has the right to do so. But 
I'm not sure if allowing that is a core requirement for editors.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"