>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 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For political reasons, LISTSERV support is being withdrawn from the following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
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