Hi Clinton,
You know, I'm not too crazy about the "croak" part.
For example, yesterday I attempted to compile a map of a large portion of Europe from Geofabrik.de, which provides daily extracts. The entire procedure took many hours (osmosis -> split -> mkgmap) on my antiquated (2 years old) hardware. Sometime in the middle of the night, I ended up with the "croak" and a polite apology that the map could not be compiled due to an invalid bbox somewhere.
Now to correct this, I would have to figure out where the invalid data came from, try to correct it, upload it, and wait another day until the Geofabrik extract is available, and then start again.
This may be a considerable incentive to correct the bad data ;-), but it is inconvenient, to say the least, when attempting to compile large areas. :-(
Er... would it be possible to warn and continue with the compilation, knowing that parts of the map would be corrupt? (a "--force" option, or something?)
It's a tricky situation because by the time the problem is detected lots of half built data structures are around some of which will refer to the nodes/ways that are going to have to be thrown away to be able to carry on without croaking. I will have a go a trying to find a means of continuing in this situation but it's likely that the resulting map will be broken as far as routing is concerned. Let's see what can be done. Cheers, Mark