On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:03 AM, Richard Fairhurst <[email protected]> wrote: > What is unacceptable is the relentless, harrying, dismissive, abusive manner > in which you and others advance the former view over the latter. That is why > we cannot retain developers.
We really need to be careful to target the philosophical standpoint, not the people. As I said (now countless times), iD is awesome. I don't think I've been criticizing developer talent or code quality. I wouldn't have provided most of its translations into my language if I thought differently. Anyway, should this conversation be about iD? In a way yes, but not only. Other editors (except JOSM) seem to have the same aversion of relations. Relations are valuable and are not going away, several of them (the most critical being "route") have been approved long ago by the community (by consensus, by public voting), so I believe fighting them only make things worse. Fighting them is fighting the community. Others, such as boundary, are de facto standards. They have to be properly tamed. One way is to hide them so that only "clever" people can deal with them. Another is to teach everybody in the simplest possible manner so that they become widely accessible. Cliché quote: "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler," some attribute to Einstein. When people are deleting and combining ways, they are editing invisible data - tags and parent relations. In a world without relations, combining different tags would still be an issue. For instance, the "sidewalk" tag is not visible. It should be visible. If it ever becomes visible, there is still a huge repository of approved tags that won't be. The current approach - concatenation - is essentially invisible in many situations (the user must pay a lot of attention at the result). I would like to see a scenario where a casual mapper (the target audience of all editors besides JOSM) would prefer not to be notified about a potential mistake. I do mapping sprints very often, I'm knowledgeable, and even so I prefer to get interrupted in my mapping whenever I do something potentially damaging. Without that, even with my experience, I would have broken data multiple times. How is that casual mappers would prefer not to have that? It is a contradiction to design the application for casual mappers and still place fastest mapping at utmost priority. A casual mapper is not aware of the data model, and should not be expected to be so. Back to the problem that motivated me into this discussion: I see that the problem in iD is really easy to solve (much easier than in Potlach). If there is an objection to an interaction-blocking modal window, other non-blocking visual cues can be used, such as a distinctive alert bar at the bottom, an alert icon at the action button, and an alert log on top after an action breaks something. Anything that informs the user is fine. It is not done only due to a philosophical opinion, which I think is negative to OSM as a whole. The opinion is negative, not the people that hold it. Maybe people are also being idealistic: instead of implementing a little workaround, they'd rather wait and see if a cleverer, less intrusive solution emerges. It is clearly not happening, after two years of waiting and wondering by the most involved minds in the project. Getting a simple alert when deleting relation members was a huge struggle. Since "combining" implies "deleting" I don't think the current issue should need to be so widely discussed. The only reason I don't set out and try writing my own editor (which is a pretty big undertaking) is that my country's map still needs lots of data, and my country's community still needs lots of support. Potlatch, iD and JOSM have solved that, mostly. All I ask for is a minor refinement, which I believe is good not only here but in the whole world. -- Fernando Trebien +55 (51) 9962-5409 "Nullius in verba." _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
