Hi,
(Warning: long and difficult subject matter ahead! :-) )
I love to work with JOSM, but I have two problems with JOSM.
- When you start drawing a way somewhere in a node, JOSM always assumes
you want to continue some way already present.
This is very annoying and unproductive, because this is nearly always
not what you wanted or intended.
- When you split a way, the old id (and by consequence its history) are
always in the first part, and the second part gets a new id.
This way the history and id can be left by the smallest part. It should
always assigned to the biggest part.
Togheter this combination defeats totally the wiki nature of OSM by
disguising the history of one road to some totally unrelated road in
the neighbourhood, also making changes to roads the user never intended
to edit.
An example is in changeset
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/7203063
First there was the Verstrekenstraat.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/98440181
When the user TAA tried to add a track,
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/82861117
from this crossing
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/298362740
JOSM maked this as a continuation of the Verstrekenstraat
It was then splitted and adapted to track by the user who didn't want
this long Verstrekenstraat.
But as this road had the node, where the drawing took place, as starting
node, the track end became the new starting node of the resulting way
and got after the split the id of the Verstrekenstraat.
After the split, (because the user wanted to add a track and not make a
long Verstrekenstraat), JOSM moved the existing id (and history) to the
new drawn track and maked a new road out of the already existing
Verstrekenstraat by giving it a 0 id. In the history of the track , you
see the original way of the Verstrekenstraat.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/82861117/history
An example of a node to test this unwanted behaviour is:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/803205990 Suppose you want to
add a track into the wood as a dead end. You select the node and then
clicks the way drawing tool. Do a click in the wood (direction SE) and
then escape to end drawing the segment and then you end up with an
extended path of Voetweg 48.
Oh no, I wanted to add a track! Why is it not a blank road?
Oh, never mind, we split the result at the starting node and change
properties of the new added part, which has now inherited the id and
history of Voetweg 48. And on top of that the original Voetweg 48 will
get id 0 and be presented from now on in the database as a new way
created by you, while you even had no intention to modify it in the
first place!!
BTW, also relations are inherited, making tails on it after the split.
I find this behaviour totally undesiable!
Another example to what mess this can lead is the Jachtdreef in
Jezus-Eik (it still needs correction)
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/51768961/history
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/108859153/history
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/97836493/history
Conclusion:
- JOSM should only make continuations of ways on request by the user, eg
by selecting them together with the ending node to draw from.
- For the sake of history, JOSM should give the existing id to the
largest part of the road of a split and not defaulting to the first part.
As stopgap for the second point, I try to do a reverse of the road
before and after the split, when I notice that the first part is very
small..
What do you think?
I opened a ticket for this, at JOSM, but it seems a 'feature' and not a
bug and the developer won't fix.
http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/6567
Comments invited!
Regards,
Gerard.
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