RE: I feel particularly slow

Thanks for that clarification. It explains a bit, as even if it's not a practical issue due to non-assertion, it's hard to imagine the FSF core folks failing to address the issue. But if for most of its life it wasn't particularly critical code anyway, but rather, could be dropped without much worry if worse came to worse, priorities on it could indeed drop as well. Only when it finds a more critical use does priority get high enough to followup and actually get the issue resolved.

It /is/ comforting to read (in Simon Phipps blog, early 2009, in the context of his announcement of the BSD relicensing that ultimately fell thru) that both Debian and Fedora were planning on dropping the code if it wasn't relicensed.

Duncan