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Investigating changesets

I find that it's very hard to understand what it happening in a changset, it's easy to get an suspicion that something is amiss but it's very hard to dig deeper. Does anyone have any scripts, methods or just tips that will help in investigating a changeset?

The only two things I've find was:

OSM history/changeset Vizualizer which tries to declutter a changeset, with vectors on a map.
osmdiff renders a map and prints a report with all changed tags and geometries.

Take this changeset on OSM main site and on OSM History Vizualizer, it's very hard to figure out exactly what happend. (I'm not pointing fingers at the creator of the changeset, I just haven't been bothered to find a changeset where I have recreated and removed lots of stuff.)

So to restate some questions.

what do you look for when you look at a changeset?
is there a way to create the before.osm and after.osm files given a changeset ID. (to make osmdiff happy)
is there a similar changeset viewer like the one on the main site, that doesn't make you click "next page" all the time.?

It might be a good idea to try to split up answers

changeset tools webservice history

asked 14 Aug '11, 01:20

emj
2.0k●12●35●47
accept rate: 15%

edited 24 Oct '11, 09:09

If you know that the question should be discussed on the mailinglist why do you ask it here?

(14 Aug '11, 12:22) petschge

This does not appear to be a question, rather the author wants to have a discussion.

(14 Aug '11, 13:00) emacsen

Might is not the same thing as "should". There must be people who have researched changesets and answers describing personal methods would really help. I do not think it warrants down votes just because it's hard to give good answers.

(14 Aug '11, 14:54) emj

I would quite like to know some people's answers to this question myself. From that point of view it's quite good. But yes, it's more of a discussion than an a specific question.

(15 Aug '11, 13:48) Harry Wood

Thanks for mentioning the history viewer. This is a great tool. I usually used itoWorld for this, but its updates take a week.

(14 Oct '13, 08:21) Chaos99