Reporter: Jonathan Bennett
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 9.01am, Tuesday, 18th August 2009]

Brain dump follows:

It would be nice if, when "deleting" an object because you're merging it into another or replacing it with a different form, the client could communicate this to the server, which in turn kept a record of this and made this information available via an appropriate HTTP response -- this would be a 302 if the object was merged into another, or maybe a 300 if it was split into many others.

For objects which have really been deleted the server could still return 410.

An example would be a road where each end had been mapped separately as a stub, which are eventually merged into a single Way when the whole length had been mapped. While you could extend one of the stubs to form the new, complete Way, one would have to be deleted. If the server knew it had been merged into another Way, it could return a more helpful HTTP response.

The benefit to the project is that data URLs become more reliable as a way of referring to real-world objects: Even if the data gets munged by various edits, you can still get some useful data back from it.