Compression

Some of the tools used to work with OpenStreetMap data support reading OSM+XML files compressed using gzip or bzip2.

Need for a compressed OSM format requirement

This behaviour is not consistent across OSM tools, so adding a compliance requirement for compressed OSM+XML would be very useful to be able to use open such compressed OSM files in several tools without decompressing.

Examples:

• planet.osm-snapshots is compressed using bzip2
• mkgmap support *.osm.gz
• Kosmos can read *.osm.bz2

Discussion

Support bzip2 across all tools, for instance?

gzip and lzma support all the way would be nice to have.

Tools

To compress or uncompress archives, on Windows I recommend 7zip which can handle most of the formats that Openstreetmap uses. Remember that you should compress things with the ZIP format not 7zip format.