Here is another piece of immediately discardable mail for the information of whomever might be interested, and which I would have sent to DEAR-EXEC instead if such a list existed. I have read in EXEC24 89 that the estimated amount of time required for "LISTSERV maintenance, development and documentation" is 1.5 week per month. First I would like to suppress an irrelevant comment about the Man-Month Syndrom. Now that this unproductive comment is suppressed, I would like to say that "LISTSERV documentation" alone warrants a full-time position for at least 3 to 6 months, depending on the litterary skills of the person in question and on his command of the english language, whereas just answering user questions and processing bug reports is about 25% of the time of the type of (2-years experience, ie type-2 of the LISTSERV surveys) staff described later in the paper, or 1.0 week/month. Fixing the bugs and modifying the software to adapt to important changes in the network (new gateway software, etc) is a very variable amount of work, and I will therefore give no estimate on this, especially as it strongly depends on the knowledge of the person in question (I have serious doubts as to whether a type-2 staff can maintain the LISTSERV assembler code at all). Finally, development is, by definition, an amount of time which entirely depends on what Management wants to see implemented, and that it is therefore entirely up to EARN to estimate. Finally, I find it interesting to see that EARN has eventually reverted to their original "we will hire two full-time persons" position, which the Technical Group had so strongly argued against. I recommend that all interested parties should order file EARN24 89 from LISTSERV@UKACRL and read it. Now I understand much better why EARN is so eager to have me maintaining LISTSERV on a continued basis until they find someone to do the work (this does not, however, change my position on the subject). People who really think it might be productive to discuss this in further details should do so on LSTSRV-L only, to avoid cross-posting. Eric