>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Start of official statement <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< For political reasons, LISTSERV support is being withdrawn from the following EARN countries: - Germany - France This withdrawal takes effect immediately, and will last until a suitable solution to the "LISTSERV problem" has been found and the corresponding arrangements have been made with EARN. Users and LISTSERV maintainers of the aforementioned countries who are not satisfied with this decision are invited to contact their BoD member, who is the normal channel of communication for problems of a political nature (see the minutes of the Tel-Aviv BoD meeting for more information). Users and LISTSERV maintainers of the aforementioned countries faced with technical problems related to LISTSERV should contact their EARN technical staff; I will no longer accept bug reports or answer questions from postmasters of these countries. One month after the next version of LISTSERV has been released, all the servers in the aforesaid countries will have to be disconnected from the LISTSERV backbone, according to the rules of operation for the LISTSERV backbone. Fortunately, there is no new LISTSERV release planned in the foreseeable future, and we have been making considerable progress on the "LISTSERV problem" recently. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> End of official statement <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Before going any further I would like to make sure that you understand I am not doing this just to make life more difficult for EARN. This is a dummy announcement, since I do not plan to release any new version of LISTSERV in the near future, and in fact I spend so much time on the "LISTSERV and EARN" nonsense that I don't even have time to look at bug reports. It does not give me any kind of sadistic pleasure to withdraw my support from anybody. And if it were an emotional decision, I would have included Ireland and a few other countries. The reason why I bothered to do it is twofold. First, of course, I have good reasons to refuse to keep providing any kind of volunteer help to these two countries. But most importantly, there are still a number of people who do not realize that there is a real problem there (to avoid any possible misunderstanding, this is not an attack at the EARN Executive or anything like that, they are part of those who do realize the seriousness of the problem). People who write letters to me saying "Why don't you just keep things as they are, since it worked so well in the past" are of course right from the technical point of view, but are not providing any help to solve a problem that cannot be ignored. It is high time that EARN got itself a professional, EARN-guaranteed maintenance for LISTSERV, so that users do not have to suffer a loss in service if the BoD goes on treating the "so-called volunteers" with a haughty lack of consideration. It is high time that I got rid of this political nonsense, so that I can calmly concentrate on writing good software. I have just finished porting the last of our local mods to SP2. It was admittedly the toughest one, and used to crash the system without producing a dump and without loading a wait PSW that would have allowed me to take a standalone dump, but it should never have taken me 4 days for just this one update. But how can you debug a tricky problem by working 10 minutes on it every hour? Eric