I am considering a modification in the import scripts to avoid getting too large databases in Mapnik. In particular, Germany, France, and maybe few more countries that

* are huge in terms of OSM data
* have sub-regions defined

will be made available only through sub-regions. All recommended backends are able to "glue" on fly the downloaded maps allowing users to download all the regions of Germany/France if there is such interest.

From my side, I will probably stop getting questions on why Germany/France maps don't show up with the logs showing broken SQLite database messages and me suspecting that its due to filesystem and/or sqlite driver limitations.

So, if there will be no protests to this plan, I might as well do it. However, if it turns out that many of you use these bigger datasets, we may continue as it is as well.

Note that, at this stage, its a proposal, not decided strategy