I will be out of touch for a few weeks

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

Looks like I'm going to have no internet connectivity for a few  
weeks ... the laptop I'm writing this on needs work, and my main  
development machine died near the end of November and the replacement  
has failed to arrive ... after having failed to deliver it once, Dell  
seem to have finally shipped it ... but the delivery estimate of the  
courier they used (who say that it was shipped late yesterday  
afternoon ... the last date on which Dell said it would be delivered)  
is the 4th of January.

My apologies to people who were expecting me to do integration of  
mingw patches into the base library, but I've been unable to do that  
for lack of a system, and it looks like I probably can't even start  
until 5th Jan :-(

Anyway ... have a good christmas/new-year, and don't expect any  
replies to email until the 2nd week in January (at which point, feel  
free to nag me in case I miss stuff in the huge flood of emails I  
expect to get when I get online again).