Dan...

Have to admit that I VERY rarely if ever use the fix button, and then
only after I've isolated the issue for a specific error or warning.  I
do errors first, then warnings.  But after each correction, I revalidate
to refresh the list. Maybe that's overkill, but it keeps the exceptions
from being thrown.  I think you're getting the exceptions because you've
modified the data, but have not updated the list.  Usually, I just
highlight the specific error or warning, hit the SELECT button, then the
"3" key to go there.  I fix it manually if I can, then re-validate.
Then move to the next issue.  I'm too much of a scaredy-cat to highlight
a whole class of errors and let JOSM fix them automatically.  Like I
said, I'm not sure JOSM likes me.

I'll try selecting an unnamed way warning and "fixing" to see what
happens.  If it removes the way.... well, that's certainly ONE way to
fix it.

Sam L.  


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Charrois <d...@syz.com>
To: Talk-CA OpenStreetMap <talk-ca@openstreetmap.org>
Subject: [Talk-ca] Did I just find a potentially significant bug in
JOSM?
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:42:09 -0700


I've spent the past several hours trying to find out out why some of my edits 
resulted in some accidental road removals.  I think I've found the problem, 
which seems to relate to an apparent bug in JOSM, or at least a preference 
somewhere set to something unintuitive that I haven't been able to find - as 
such, I thought it would be best to communicate with the group to see if 
anyone's experienced this problem before, or at least give a heads up as to 
what has been happening to me in case it's inadvertently happening to others.

I downloaded an area around the Beaumont, Alberta region to try and add some 
roads from Canvec that don't exist in OSM (roads which I could have sworn I've 
added when I worked on the same area a month or two ago).  I then saved this 
downloaded area, along with the changes I made, to an .osm file in JOSM.  I ran 
the Validator which found a few duplicate nodes and such.  Telling it to fix 
errors, it did its thing.  And then, I clicked on "warnings" and told it to fix 
those.  Lo and behold, some (though not all) of the roads I'd just added 
suddenly disappeared.  Since validation was the last step in my process before 
I uploaded the data, and I was often zoomed all the way out when I did so, I 
hadn't noticed this happen before, but it probably had been going on right 
before I uploaded my changes.  In particular, sometimes I would replace lower 
quality OSM roads with better Canvec data, and if JOSM was deleting some of 
those Canvec roads I'd added in its "fix warnings" validation step,
 those original OSM roads would have disappeared without replacements.

I tried to isolate further exactly what it was doing, and at least in this 
situation it looks like it may be related to unnamed ways.  I have 41 unnamed 
ways in my data.  If I click on the "unnamed ways" folder specifically in the 
"warnings" validation dialog, it doesn't give me the option to fix them - it 
shouldn't, since it doesn't know what to call them anyway.  But if I click on 
the parent (root) icon just labelled "Warnings", the fix button is enabled, and 
I thought it was just supposed to fix all the enclosed warnings in categories 
that it is able to fix.  When I click to "fix" all warnings like this, in the 
progress bar, I see that it spends some time "fixing" unnamed ways.  And then 
those ways are gone when it's done.

I was using JOSM 3751, so I checked for updates and found that 3961 was 
available.  I've updated my JOSM to see if it's still an issue.  But now, when 
I do the "global" fix warnings on the data set, it gets part way through, then 
consistently gives me an unexpected exception (coding error).  When I dismiss 
that dialog, I find that those roads have again been removed, so it seems as 
though this is still a problem.  The unexpected exception isn't encouraging 
either.

I suppose that I can work around the problem by selectively choosing "fix" in 
the validations warning area for each of the separate categories, instead of 
doing them all at once.  Though now I'm unsure as to whether or not there is 
still an underlying problem with fixing warnings that may give rise to an 
inadvertent loss of data.  At the very least, I wanted to make a posting about 
it so that others can be warned away from having the same problems I have run 
into.

If anyone is interested in trying to duplicate the problems I'm having, just 
let me know your email address and I can send you the .osm file I'm working 
with (compressed, it's about 600 kB).  And of course, if anyone has any ideas, 
or suggestions about something stupid I'm doing, please let me know!

Dan
--
Syzygy Research & Technology
Box 83, Legal, AB  T0G 1L0 Canada
Phone: 780-961-2213


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