OpenStreetMap
I am happy to annouce that, after a long time we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new major release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.
The main change that warrants a new major release is the move to the osm2pgsql flex backend. This now requires an osm2pgsql version >= 1.8.0. It, so far, only comes with very few and subtle changes in rendering results related to changes in defaults in polygon/linestring classification of closed ways. The database schema is explicitly meant to be backwards compatible from the style side so style users who render different styles from the same database should be able to continue to do so without problems. We hope to use the additional flexibility of osm2pgsql in the future, but we have decided to do this step by step - and with this release only make the formal move but not yet make larger changes to the database. Deployments none the less should do a full database reload.
What we have, however, in this release is an additional table with the commonly used values for shop and office tags. This is generated and filled with an sql script (common-values.sql) that is included in the style. This needs to be run on the database before using the style - like existing indexes.sql and functions.sql.
Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.
