The Street Spirit style contains the code used by the OSMF’s Vector Tile Service. This doesn’t make sense at first glance but requires some knowledge of the history and planned future direction.

A style like Street Spirit requires code for loading OSM data into a database, code for turning the database contents into vector tiles, and a MapLibre GL style to create a viewable map. Genenerating Shortbread tiles requires the first two of these, but there are existing styles out there that turn the vector tiles into a viewable map.

Some features are common across maps. Building polygons are a good example — almost every map will need the same data in the database. Street Spirit was started before the OSMF Vector Tile work, and this gave me a starting point for the code from Shortbread. I combined this with the experimental osm2pgsql themepark shortbread theme.

Long term the plan is to keep as much code in common as possible, and have the option to generate Street Spirit tiles, Shortbread tiles, or both. Generating both would happen out of one database with reduced duplication.

Right now I’m in the middle of this process. A lot of work has been done on Shortbread, but Street Spirit hasn’t been a focus. The reason the Shortbread code is in the Street Spirit repository is not because of what it is now, but because of where it came from and where it’s going.