A number of  EARN sites have asked me  for a list of reasons for  going to 1.6
which can be explained to a manager  with little knowledge of the "EARN arena"
(such  managers  are,  of  course,  enclined   to  act  as  per  the  official
recommendation of the EARN Executive Committee).  First I would like to repeat
that I am by no means going  to start an "advertisement" programme to get EARN
sites to run 1.6,  hand out (electronic) tracts or shiny  posters to EARN site
directors, or anything like that. I believe of course that it is better to run
1.6  than 1.5o,  otherwise I  would not  have gone  to the  pain of  making it
available to EARN, but  if a site doesn't want it I'm very  happy with it; I'm
just trying to help  sites which do want it but have  trouble justifying it on
not-too-technical grounds.
 
Basically, what you gain with release 1.6 is the following:
 
- Full support of VM/XA  and CMS 5.5 (in 370 mode), which  is not available in
  1.5o. If relevant to your installation, this is a very strong argument.
 
- Three infinite-loop generating  bugs have been fixed in release  1.6 (one in
  1.6a, two in 1.6c). The one fixed in 1.6a is a major one, which is presently
  hitting LISTSERV@CEARN about twice a week. This  can save a lot of CPU time,
  in addition to the increase in reliability.
 
- Performance improvement through suppression of SENT FILE messages and factor
  of  4 improvement  to LSVBITFD;  this is  unlikely to  have any  significant
  impact  on non-backbone  or  low-volume  sites, but  for  a small  dedicated
  machine it can be a strong argument.
 
- Generalized use of BSMTP for  domain-address recipients, along with batching
  of recipients  in outbound  DISTRIBUTE jobs,  can dramatically  decrease the
  load on local  gateways. This will decrease the load  on the network anyway,
  but I suppose the said manager will  consider it about as important an issue
  as the colour of the first pair of  socks his mother used on him when he was
  a baby.
 
- General statistics  on the  usage of LISTSERV  become available  through the
  SHOW command, and  can be collected relatively easily by  a server or simple
  local change. This allows  the site to monitor the activity  of the usage of
  the server, etc. Some shops like that kind of stuff a lot.
 
- The UDD is available  in release 1.6. Since the doc is  not written and some
  of  the netwide  functions are  not  finished, it  may  not be  a very  good
  argument.
 
- If you have  a lot of lists,  the improved handling of  rejected mail (which
  saves a good amount of postmaster time) and moderated lists (saves moderator
  time, usually less  precious as these tend to be  professors or students not
  paid by the computing centre) may be worth mentioning.
 
That's all I could of right off the  top of my hat. Of course, saying that 138
sites are  running 1.6 and  50 have  1.5o (out of  which a dozen  have already
indicated that they want to get 1.6) may help.
 
  Eric