[OSM-talk] Could/should editors detect/disallow huge changeset bboxes?

Tobias Knerr osm at tobias-knerr.de
Fri Jun 12 12:35:58 UTC 2020


On 12.06.20 13:00, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I wonder if it would be feasible or desirable for editors to warn users
> if they are at risk of creating country/world-spanning changesets.

It would certainly be a improvement for day-to-day work.

The root of the issue, though, is that bounding boxes are a poor basis
to determine whether a changeset is of interest to a mapper watching a
particular region. If a changeset contains a change in France and one in
Poland, then a mapper observing Germany should really just not be
alerted to that changeset in the first place, and it should be possible
for a mapper in Poland to view only the subset of the changes that
affect their own country.

IMO, an ideal changeset represents one logical unit of work. It
shouldn't contain multiple unrelated changes, but at the same time,
related changes should not be split across different changesets. Right
now we're intentionally doing the latter to work around the limitations
in our tools, and I understand and support that, but I hope this view of
"large bbox = bad" doesn't get too firmly entrenched. Let's keep in mind
that it's essentially a workaround for missing software features, that
the proper fix is to improve the software, and that we should drop this
rule once the reasons for it no longer exist.



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