[gdal-dev] Why are fields required in osmconf.ini file?

[Brad Hards]

> Why is that so? Why do field names need to be predefined before their
> extraction from the .osm file?
>
> Why can't only those fields which already exist in the .osm file, be 
> extracted?
How could ogr2ogr possibly know what fields are in the file? It would require 
a full parse of the file, and likely give you many more fields than you 
possibly want in any case.

Brad