Actually, I plan to add Mapbox GL support in parallel with the current tile based widget. The main aim is to both enable early testing with fallback to the current widget & support for Jolla 1 class devices where Mapbox GL is not supposed to run very well.

But if some of the recent user feedback turns out to be correct (eq. Mapbox GL actually runs fine on Jolla 1 & similar) then this option might not be needed & modRana might be able to switch to Mapbox GL on Sailfish OS exclusively. Then indeed the Mapnik rendering might not longer be really needed.

Actually, I'm a Fedora user & packager (I maintain for example the Fedora pyotherside & pydbus packages) and have been thinking it might not be a bad idea to package the OSM Scout Server for Fedora to make it available to the broader Linux user community.

The features and APIs OSM Scout Server provides are more or less unrivaled by any other project and I can see many uses even on plain desktops/notebooks, such as offline POI search and map display. While desktop users are mostly online these days there might still be very valid usecases for using offline geodata, such as bad connectivity while traveling or wanting to guard ones privacy from online mapping vendors.

Also a bit subjective reason - I develop modRana primarily on desktop so it would be nice to have the same set of APIs available even during general development. Also modRana uses more and more of the awesome OSM Scout Server functionality, so having modRana on desktop as full featured as on Sailfish OS would be nice.

In any cases this is at this point still more or less a nice to have compared to Sailfish OS support, but I'm ready to help with package review & be a package maintainer if needed. There is also the possibility to use Copr, which is a Fedora service similar to PPAs/OBS to build OSM Scout Server packages rather than target inclusion as a "official" Fedora package from the start.