There has been an increased alertness to my changeset comments in recent weeks. I thought it reasonable, since I’m half-inventing words, to explain at greater length what on earth was going on.

I started mapping in March by entering house numbers & names onto the map & have continued doing that most days since. I’ve been using terracer within JOSM to do it, including associatedStreet relations for each house, something that terracer made easy. The team that maintain JOSM have been working hard to allow it to work under Java-8 (the dependency was previously on Java-7); however, many plugins (including terracer) are unmaintained and, as the chief developer informed me, they do not bother to check what effect their changes have upon any plugin.

Shortly after I started, version-32158 started crashing JOSM when certain options were selected and, shortly after, it was NOT possible to create a relation with terracer under any circumstances. That circumstance continues today, using the current-stable JOSM-10786 (terracer-32699).

This is how to create a new associatedStreet relation:

1. Select your street ways + all houses
2. From the menu, choose menu:Presets | Relations | Associated Street
3. From the dialog, Enter the name of the street
4. Press “New relation”
5. (house members should get a ‘house’ role, whilst the street ways get a ‘street’ role)

That was fine, and it worked, but I only knew how to create a new relation, and not how to add new members to an existing relation. Consequently, and especially with big roads, the number of relations for each road began to grow. I was fragging (fragmenting) the street relations.

Eventually, I discovered how to add new houses to an existing associatedStreet relation. This is how you do it:

1. Select the houses and/or street(s) to add to an existing same-street relation
2. Switch on the Relations window (menu:Windows | Relations) or (alt-shift-R)
3. Select the associatedStreet relation to add to and click on ‘Edit’
4. The houses, etc. that you selected outside of the Relation Editor are now selected in the RHS window; click on the button to add them to the relation
5. (optional) sort the relation
6. Click to save

I hadn’t done it deliberately but, since it was me that had fragmented so many street relations, It seemed only reasonable that it should be me that defragged them. Hence the changesets. I notified them one at a time so that, if something went horribly wrong, it would be easy to revert any individual street.