[OSM-dev] Direct .osm plugin for Mapnik

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello Artem (and anyone else interested),

I was thinking that it would be a good idea to work on a direct plugin for 
.osm data in Mapnik. I decided to risk upgrading from sarge to etch on the 
Freemap server last night (I say 'risk' as I broke my Debian installation 
on my home box last summer doing the same thing due to something going 
wrong upgrading XFree86 -> X.org) and now have Mapnik installed on 
Freemap. 

However, to do rendering I'll still need to go through shapefile which 
obviously is not the most efficient way of doing things on a webserver. 
What would be good would be to fetch .osm from the API, render tiles 
directly then cache for say a month or a week, whatever's the best balance 
between an up-to-date tile set and reducing the load on the OSM API.

Should this be easy to do? I already have the libosm C++ library for 
parsing .osm. I guess it's a case of looking at the existing plugins in 
Mapnik.

Nick