Dear Forum members,

As indicated several times, we are getting close to the date when GAP
headquarters will finally change to St. Andrews. The preparation of
the move has been a steady process; as you have seen, the last update
of GAP 3 to GAP 3.4.4 has already been released from St. Andrews. The
next step, that I am announcing with this letter, is the move of the
GAP related addresses to St. Andrews. We apologize for the
inconvenience of having to get used to these changes, but we assure
you that the St. Andrews team will do its best to minimize changes
caused by the move of GAP headquarters there.

1. We ask you to use from now on the addresses on the right hand side
of the following list instead of those on the left hand side for
communication with the GAP team.

gap@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE -> gap@dcs.st-and.ac.uk
gap-trouble@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE -> gap-trouble@dcs.st-and.ac.uk
gap-forum@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE -> gap-forum@dcs.st-and.ac.uk
miles@Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE -> miles@dcs.st-and.ac.uk

We will for a short while provide an automatic service which forwards
mails sent to the old address to the respective new one, however after
GAP headquarters have moved to St. Andrews this can be provided only
for a short time, so we ask and recommend to get used to the new
addresses and change your address lists as soon as possible
accordingly.

In our experience the different functionality of the four addresses
has meanwhile been very well understood and the addresses are used
frequently. Let me nevertheless repeat briefly:

- the address 'gap' is on one hand meant for questions about the
availability of GAP and on the other for our information that GAP
has been installed in some place, which we very much appreciate
to get in each case.

- the address 'gap-trouble' is meant for questions and requests for
help to the GAP Support Team that are not of general interest but
can be discussed between the user asking and the one from the GAP
team answering.

- the address 'gap-forum' is for general announcements about GAP,
the discussion of questions of possibly general interest, for the
announcement of bugs and their fixes as well as of newly
available functionality in GAP or share packages or deoposited
contributions. Mail sent to this address goes to all (about 400)
members of the GAP-forum.

- 'miles' is the address to which subscriptions to the GAP-Forum,
unsubscriptions from it etc. can be sent as put forward in the
GAP Announcement. While with either of the first three addresses
the mail will be read (and hopefully answered) by human beings,
answers from 'miles' are automatically created by a program.

With taking over these addresses the St. Andrews team will try to
further improve the service to the community of GAP users.

- For each of the first three addresses, a coordinator has been named,
who will try to ensure quick and smooth work of the correspondence to
the respective address. They are:

for 'gap'           Ed Robertson
for 'gap-trouble'   Mike Atkinson
for 'gap-forum'     Mike Atkinson

- Furthermore we can announce two new members of the GAP Support Team:
Frank Luebeck and Sebastian Egner, while Alice Niemeyer is leaving the
team after several years of helping it. Allow me to thank her for her
help and the two new members for their willingness.

- Finally the St. Andrews team intends to make selections from the
discussions in gap-trouble generally available via WWW. While
certainly it does not make sense to publish all of these discussions,
some being of a very special nature, it is hoped that the publication
of selected discussions will provide some approximation to an often
requested list of 'frequently asked questions'.

2. Together with these changes of mailing addresses, also some of the
directories provided in Aachen so far will move to St. Andrews:

ftp.Math.RWTH-Aachen.DE         -> ftp-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk
  /pub/incoming                 ->   /pub/gap/incoming
  /pub/gap                      ->   /pub/gap/gap
  /pub/gap/deposit              ->   /pub/gap/gap/deposit

St. Andrew will keep the master copy, while Aachen will just be a
mirror of these.

3. Please note finally, that the policy how to treat GAP programs and
other GAP related material sent to 'incoming' will change:

We ask you to further send such material to 'incoming'. However it
will be sorted then according to its nature into the subdirectories of
'deposit'. The St. Andrews team will give more information on this
sorting in a later letter.

Thank you for your attention. Please do not hesitate to ask (probably
in 'gap-trouble') if there should be any unclearness left with this
change of the GAP related addresses, and in particular do immediately
alarm me or some other member of the GAP team, should anything go
wrong with it.

Wishing you further fun and success using GAP,

Joachim Neubueser