Well, then I think it's time for you ISPs to start donating more resources to us.

It's a pretty simple equation which would be solved in the commercial world by us charging you more money. Since we're not in the commercial world, then it stands to reason that if you or anyone else wants feature or service "X", which we claim is beyond our resources, then it's your task to ensure that we have the resources we need.

Knowing your position of relative wealth (far more than any of ours), why not hire a part-timer and "give" him to us? He can work with the other full or part time programmers the other ISPs (or other commercial interests) hire to make -stable everything you want it to be. Everybody gets what they want then - we stop having our very limited resources bifurcated, you get your -stable branch.

Anyway, let's Just Do It or stop pounding shoes on the table talking about how "-stable MUST NOT DIE!" and it's up to the current developers to pull a rabbit out of their hats and somehow make it all work. I'd be happy to talk to Karl (or anyone else) about co-managing whatever human resources they can donate to the project.

I should also note here that any other proposals which involve me or anyone closely involved in -current development doing the work will be politely deleted - I think I've already made my position more than clear and I will not be budged on it. It's just too much work, members of the core team have complained to me in private that -stable was sucking the life force out of the project (or refused to participate in -stable at all) and they wished we'd stop, this is not a problem that suddenly appeared - it's been 15 months in the making and now we need some additional man power if we're going to deal with it in any more permanant fashion.

As I said, I'd be more than happy to talk with the "vested interest" folks in seeing how they personally might not take more responsibility for the -stable service they've come to appreciate. Everyone always talks about how they'd like to give something back, well, here's a golden opportunity! Give me about 2 - 3 part-time employees and I'll give you back a -stable that will make all of us very happy.

Jordan