On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 13:44, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Of course, if keeping stuff in sync is practically impossible, a good >> import is probably going to have to be manual (if you can't keep stuff >> in sync, and the data is in a form which is already commonly used for >> non-imported data, then you can't avoid redundancies in the import). > > This is largely a problem with our tools, not something that can't be > fixed. > > Distributed version control systems already solve the problem of > merging foreign data where your copy of it has moved since the > original import, there's no reason for why we couldn't make keeping > imports up-to-date significantly easier using similar techniques. > I don't know of any "distributed version control systems" which do anything remotely close to this. It seems to me to be an AI-hard problem in the general case (*). There are, of course, tools which can do this in specialized cases, but that's where the "if" in the "if keeping stuff in sync is practically impossible" comes into place.
(*) In fact, I'd say that anyone who can devise a general tool which can merge all the different foreign databases together has thereby rendered OSM obsolete. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
