On 02/08/2020 06.05, Simon Poole wrote:
Extending this a bit further, you could just as well say, given that all
current and actively maintained general purpose editors require 1-2
FTEs, the OSMF should simply block all non-iD editors and tell the
developers to either work on iD or go home.
For OSMF *funding* purposes this might happen, but telling volunteers
what they should or should not volunteer to work on should be a hard no-go.
iD is branching out in to more and more niches, reducing the
breathing space for anything else massively and other editor use has
effectively been stagnating for a long time. While people will
automatically try to start listing special use cases that can "only"
be done with editor XX, the problem is that these are special cases
and unlikely to be worth spending a couple of $100k on per year
(virtually or real) for the small number of users that will remain as
iD gains more and more features.
There are a few things iD does "better" than JOSM¹, but it is *far* from
feature parity... and one use case which I consider *absolutely
essential* before it could be considered a JOSM replacement is the
ability to load and save local files (notably including shapefiles and
geotiffs) and work on non-OSM layers... and I'm not sure that will ever
happen. JOSM isn't "really" an OSM editor, it's a GIS tool that
"happens" to have really good OSM integration. (Note also that these
features are *mandatory* for doing imports from other GIS data.)
I've been using JOSM a lot lately, and AFAIK iD is quite some ways from
matching even some of its more "basic" functionality. Angle constrained
ways, lane view, way smoothing features, ability to mirror content
(symmetry), and more. Relations are *much* easier in JOSM. Heck, just
*selecting things* is much easier.
I'm not saying iD is *bad*. It's a very nice editor *for its
capabilities*. It's great for making *small* changes or introducing
someone to OSM editing... but there are a lot of use cases still where
JOSM is just a far superior tool. Maybe in *5-10* years that will
change, but I'm not going to hold my breath on it overtaking JOSM in 1-2.
(¹ iD can 'square up' individual nodes and does a passable job with
*mostly* orthogonal shapes with the odd 45° angle. There are ways to
work with those in JOSM, but generally speaking if you try to square a
shape with a single 'wild' node, JOSM turns the whole thing into a hot
mess.)
--
Matthew
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