On Monday 29 October 2018, Kevin Kenny wrote: > [...] > > In both cases, it's to be able easily to check, when a new version of > the external data comes out, whether anything has happened to a > particular object. I retrieve it by its ID, then test whether the > last modifying user was me. (Yes, I start with multipolygons, and > recurse into ways and points.) If I can't find an object with the ID, > or if another mapper has modified the object, then I know that I have > to treat the state of the object as unknown and conflate by hand.
For this purpose it is completely unnecessary to bother the OSM community with external IDs. If you want to check if the data has been unchanged since you added it then do exactly that - check if there are any newer versions of the objects that have originally been added in the import. I don't really understand why this discussion is coming up again and again with imports here. To me this very much looks like a 'lazy programmer' attitude - having an ID available probably seems the most conventient way to identify the object. But think about this for a moment - you want to bother the OSM community with the burden of dealing with these IDs forever just to make it a tiny bit easier for a programmer to possibly in the future write code to identify what features from the import have not been changed since they were added. Note i completely get that many programmers are unfamiliar with the OSM concepts of changesets, object versions etc. and for them it would indeed be more convenient not to have to deal with that and instead retrofit OSM to what they are used to. But that is not something OSM should accept. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
