Hi Marko,
The mkgmap default style has not been changed much ever since the current style language was implemented.
I was appointed the maintainer a couple of years ago, after I had submitted some patches.
I am sorry for my low level of activity around mkgmap in the past year.
You are welcome. There haven't been complaints on the list so the default style seems to be ok ;-)
I started refactoring the default style, but I had to suspend that, because I got too busy at my day job. Two weeks ago, I made the deadline and started vacation from work, but not from family. :-)
I think I could pick up where I left with regard to splitting the default style, some time in August or later.
Yes, that would be great if you can finish that. I am not a big style implementor but I have the feeling that some changes to the implementation would be great. Including of styles seems to be not very intuitive (I must admit I haven't tried that yet so don't blame me if that's not the case... ;-).
Long term, I am going to escape the Garmin world. The USB interface on my Edge 705 died last October or November, so that I can no longer transfer any saved GPS traces to the computer. So, I bought myself a SonyEricsson Xperia Active for replacing both my GPS receiver and a decade-old dumbphone. There was some initial firmware trouble, but now with the SportyPal bike mount and OsmAnd 0.8 I am satisfied. The GPS accuracy may be slightly worse than that of the Edge, but the Bing aerial image coverage largely compensates for that. Battery life is not a problem, thanks to my DIY dynamo-powered USB charger. Also, I like the offline vector maps and offline routing that OsmAnd 0.8 supports. The bicycle routing might currently be even worse than Garmin's if possible, but the map display will not freeze while recalculating, and I get spoken turn instructions, even for following a GPX trace.
I wonder if it would make sense to share some front-end code and area (boundary) processing code between mkgmap and OsmAndMapCreator. Both have been written in Java, after all. I have deliberately tried to avoid touching program code too much, because I get enough of that in my day job (writing C and C++).
The boundary processing is quite special in mkgmap and I don't know the OsmAndMapCreator. But maybe OsmAndMapCreator may share the precompiled boundary format and the way how they are used.
Even if I will likely not be using Garmin maps much, I plan to keep updating the map of Finland at http://www.polkupyoraily.net/osm/ (and fixing any issues reported by mkgmap) until someone else volunteers.
Best regards,
Marko
Have fun! WanMil