Splitting very long way in several pieces

[jaubert@…]

There are sometimes very long ways that should be split in several way. For example, the boundary between France and Italy has ways with over 500 nodes. I think it should be better with ways with no more than 100-node, or no longer than x km - this won't force JOSM and tilesathome to download unecessary data.

Will it be possible to add this functionality in JOSM or in utils plugin ?

[Gabriel Ebner <ge@…>]

What sort of functionality do you want? JOSM can already split ways, you just have to select the nodes where you want it to be split yourself.

[jaubert@…]

I want to "automatically" split a way in several ways, without selecting the nodes where I want to split it. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of ways to split in more than 10 pieces.

But you're right that I can split myself the ways by selecting several nodes before doing the split (which I will do for the moment).

[anonymous]

I disagree with the rule of thumb that ways should not be long.

First of all, there is the question of how "very long" is defined. Just picking a certain number of nodes or a certain length is arbitrary. If long ways are to be prohibited, there should be a reason why a certain number of nodes or a certain length is chosen.

For that matter, if long ways are so bad, why not only allow ways with a maximum of two nodes? Oh yeah, those were called segments, and were depricated. :-P

Secondly, if there is a problem with long ways, the problem lies with the thing that handles the long ways, and not the long ways themselves.

For instance, you site the example that long ways result in JOSM and Tiles@Home downloading more data. Well, they don't have to download the entire way. In this case, the problem isn't the long way, it's JOSM and Tiles@Home. If it's an issue with the API always returning the entire way rather than just the portion of the way inside the bounding box, then it's an issue with the API...you get the point.

I would therefore suggest that this ticket be closed, unless some justification can be made for not allowing long ways, and some justifcation for what constitues a "long way" be developed.

[anonymous]

This is no automatic task.

[doctau]

Given that the API now doesn't allow you to upload or change ways with more than 2000 nodes, I think this would be useful.

[anonymous]

The closing reason is still true. This is no automatic task. Usually there are good and bad positions where ways can be splitted. This should not be done by automatics.

I object against solutions like "we have more than 2000 nodes, split in the middle". This is not how it should be done.