Is LDraw diverging from bricklink?

[Pet]

Hi, I am new to LDraw so I have many many questions. I wanted to document my MOC build from one of my technic set. I've started in LDD but the I did not find some easy way to sort the building steps. I've tried the MLCad with LPub and it seems to be really great - thank you all guys for this sw. But...

I did not find any simple way to filter only parts from one (or some) sets. I've found the peeron_to_mlcad, but it is not the way I'd like to do it - to select the parts from the tree. As I am a programmer, I've started to think about a better way - to simply replace the parts.lst with my own (including color information and information on number of pieces). This way seems to work really well, but I've found the problem, which I am not able to solve automatically:

Some parts are missing (replaced by some alias) e.g.:
- 111b -> exists as 58177 (I've found it on LDraw part request forum) - is there some standard way to find this info??
- 6538c - according to Parts Tracker (http://ldraw.org/cgi-bin/tracker/activit.../6538c.dat) this part was deleted on 2013-03-13 - why?
now it exists as 59443 and this is rebrickable entry on this part: http://rebrickable.com/parts/59443 - LDraw scrap

Why is the compatibility of LDraw with other lego databases worse than it was a year ago?

Thanks for reply.

pet

[Tim Gould]

Hi,

LDraw strives to be as accurate as possible in its part numbering. That means it tends to use the official numbers, found by observation or by using Brickset's database (which is connected to LEGO's official database). Bricklink has always done things its own way, and seems to care less about accuracy. So, if you want to match an external site the recommendation is to use Brickset as your source.

Tim

[Pet]

Unfortunately, Brickset has many incomplete sets (e.g. 9393-1 is 98.6% complete). For me (now), it is easier to have some table with alternate names (conversion Bricklink <-> LDraw), than searching a missing part in a set. I was just wondering, why part that was included is deleted now.

pet

[Philippe Hurbain]

If you mean the so called 6538c, it's because this numbering is plain wrong. There is one and only one proper number for this part, 59443. In the past it was possible to correct wrong part numbers on Bricklink (and I did have quite a few corrected!), but since the great database failure at Bricklink the part correction form is no longer working (perhaps it's repaired now, I have not tried recently)