I have  remained silent on  this topic  because I have  basically nothing
much  to say.  I think  EARN  people should  be treated  like adults  and
allowed to run LISTEARN without getting  bashed if that is what they want
to do.  On the other  hand list owners should  be treated like  adults as
well  and allowed  to unpeer  their lists  from LISTEARN  servers without
bashing, if  they have  a good  reason to  do so.  With the  exception of
UKACRL, which is a  very special case, I do not want  to make any general
statement regarding LISTSERV-LISTEARN peering as this would have the same
effect as dumping  a couple hundred gallons of gas  on a bonfire; besides
which, my knowledge of LISTEARN is derived solely from my subscription to
a couple EARN working groups hosted on  a LISTEARN server, ie I am not in
any   position  to   make  qualified   statements  about   the  continued
interoperability of list peering functions in the future.
 
There is however one aspect of the  problem on which I do not hesitate to
state my  opinion, and  that is non-LISTEARN  1.5o servers.  UPGRADE THEM
ASAP!
 
- 1.5o is not presently supported by anybody.
 
- 1.5o crashes  several times a  day (assuming a typical  backbone server
  workload). Sometimes it gets into a CPU loop. Sometimes it just gets an
  addressing exception. Sometimes it fills  the spool with a console log.
  I have fixed a  lot of such crashes and loops in  1.6, and I understand
  Turgut has done the same in LISTEARN.
 
- 1.5o will crash  if you feed it  a "new format" BITEARN  NODES file. So
  will 1.6e, but that will soon be  fixed (I'll type another note on this
  topic after I'm done with this one). I assume LISTEARN will be fixed to
  support the  new format as  well. I am  pretty sure nobody  will modify
  1.5o to understand the new format; when the old format becomes history,
  1.5o sites will only be able to run on obsolete tables, and will insist
  that the closest VM-UTIL site to Christian is BITNIC :-)
 
Here  are some  statistics on  the  release distribution  of the  current
server  population. The  first table  applies only  to EARN  servers, and
shows that there are still  SEVEN backbone servers running (non-LISTEARN)
1.5o. The second  table applies to the whole network;  the discrepancy in
the number  of "backbone"  servers is due  to different  definitions, the
first table assumes "backbone" =  "DISTRIBUTE", the second one counts the
":backbone.YES" tags.
 
  Eric
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Received 49 answers out of the expected 49 (100%)
(26 answers from backbone servers)
 
+-------------------------+------------+-------------+
| Server type and version |  Backbone  | All servers |
+-------------------------+------------+-------------+
| LISTEARN (all releases) |  8 (30.8%) | 21 (42.9%)  |
+-------------------------+------------+-------------+
| LISTSERV 1.6e           | 11 (42.3%) | 18 (36.7%)  |
+-------------------------+------------+-------------+
| LISTSERV 1.5o           |  7 (26.9%) |  9 (18.4%)  |
| Other 1.5               |     -      |  1 ( 2.0%)  |
| Total 1.5               |  7 (26.9%) | 10 (20.4%)  |
+-------------------------+------------+-------------+
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Version      Non-EARN   EARN (1.6)     LISTEARN      Total
-------      --------   ----------     --------    ---------
 1.6e       165 (90%)     17            -          182 (77%)
 1.6d        12 ( 7%)      -            -           12 ( 5%)
 1.6c         1 ( 1%)      -            -            1 ( 0%)
 1.6a         2 ( 1%)      -            -            2 ( 1%)
 1.5o         2 ( 1%)      -           34 (94%)     36 (15%)
 1.5n         1 ( 1%)      -            2 ( 6%)      3 ( 1%)
 1.5i         1 ( 1%)      -            -            1 ( 0%)
 
 Total      184 (78%)     17 ( 7%)     36 (15%)    237
 Backbone    98 (53%)     13 (76%)     17 (47%)    128 (54%)