[Imports] Help with exporting data

[Adrian Popa]

Hello everybody,

I know my question is not related to importing stuff into OSM, it's 
about exporting info, but I didn't know where to turn to. So, if this 
mailing list can't help, please point me in the right direction...

I would like to export buildings and administrative borders (counties) 
from open street maps into shapefiles, so I can use them as overlays on 
other maps. I have seen that http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/ 
provided shapefiles from OSM data, but I'd like to learn to do it myself.

I've looked into osmexport (successfully installed it), but I didn't 
manage to make it export anything...
Here's what I've tried:

osmexport buildings.oxr romania.osm .

...Where buildings.oxr contains:
setup :Shp do
  polygon :building do
    number :osm_id, 10
    string :name, 100
    string :type, 20
  end
end

nodes do
    :building << { :osm_id => id, :name => name, :type => amenity }
end

So, as far as I understood, the shapefile will contain osm_id, the name 
and the type of the builing (in the dbf file) and polygon shapes in the 
other files...

The problem is - when I run the command it takes a rather long time (>15 
minutes) and it generates empty shapefiles. I'm thinking I'm missing 
something or maybe there's a typo in my config file.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Adrian