OSM Helpers tools

OSM Helpers tools are a set of obsolete tools to support automated edits.

Software described on this page or in this section is unlikely to be compatible with API v0.6 (current version) deployed in 2009.
If you have fixed the software, or concluded that this notice does not apply, remove it.

Paolo Molaro's osm-helpers

(to be formatted properly)

Paolo Molaro on the italian mailing list in late 2008 offered a download of some "osm-helpers" to download: http://www.oddwiz.org/~lupus/osm/osm-helpers-0.3.tar.gz The software is to reduce the risks of doing the mass edits. The tool basically downloads the latest version of each node/way from the db at the time of the upload and it checks that the fields/tags that need changing have still the old value before the change is applied. All the other tags are left unchanged. This way the data overwrite race lasts just a fraction of a second. Such measures are no longer necessary with the optimistic locking used in API v0.6.

People may also find the included osm-history tool useful as it displays the changes in a db object in a diff-like way (I always found it very hard to spot just the differences between versions by looking at all the data shown on the web page). Note the the tools should work on windows/OSX, but I only tested it with Mono on Linux. Feel free to mail me any bug report (and always remember to check the changes file before uploading it).

The tools that I wrote work this way:

1. a checker tool generates a changes file, this includes the object id and the new/old values for the changed tags.
2. the changes file can be inspected for error/mistakes etc
3. another tool takes the changes file and updates the objects with the protocol explained above.
4. the same upload tool can optionally notify the last contributor of the changed objects: the message will include the object id and the old/new values.

So both the changes file and the email notification serve as the 'documentation' of the changes.

More details are in the README file in the tarball.

Eddy Petrișor has made several improvements to the code and has published his changes in a git repository.

For more information and the code itself see: http://repo.or.cz/w/osm-helpers.git.

Note that the repository in question also allows anonymous contributions in the mob branch; see http://repo.or.cz/mob.html for details about using the mob user to contribute changes to the code.