[OSM-dev] Adapting Mapnik to read .osm directly?

Hello Artem (and anyone else),

How easy would it be to write a Mapnik plugin to allow Mapnik to read .osm 
files directly (skipping the postgresql stage)?  As I think I mentioned 
last week I'd like to create Mapnik OSM maps optimised for rendering 
countryside data. I was thinking of using an osm@home like distributed 
approach as I'm not sure whether my server space would be up to doing a 
large amount of rendering on a regular basis. Obviously for this to be 
taken up, it would be good to minimise the number of dependencies... and 
IIRC the postgresql configuration was the trickiest part of getting mapnik 
working on the dev server.

Though my primary interest in this would be to generate Landranger and 
Explorer-style countryside maps (with contours), this could be used for 
rendering the main OSM maps too.

I know C++ and have written SAX parsers, so I'd imagine it wouldn't be 
*too* difficult?

Thanks,
Nick