>  > My intention was to keep the build farm running until R14 was
> released, then see if any donations came in to cover some of the costs.
> However, this morning the main chiller was destroyed due to sudden power
> brownouts/surges, forcing the build farm offline. As I do not have the
> funds to replace this chiller, and with the onset of spring/warmer
> temperatures here, I cannot restart the build farm at this time.<
>
> How much money is needed?  I am admittedly spending almost all of my
> money on political expenses right now and may be too broke to do
> anything until May or June.

Right now I am looking at needing between $1500 and $2000.  This doesn't
actually cover the cost of a proper unit, but I should be able to provide
the remainder if all goes well.  If someone knows of anyone getting rid of
an older Liebert system or similar who would be willing to donate the unit
to the project, that would work just fine instead. ;-)

Once we hit the summer months I should be able to partially restart the
build farm even if the chiller has not been replaced as the existing
comfort air system is powerful enough to cool the servers.  Obviously I
won't be able to run that system until several months from now (45 degrees
outside right now), but hey, it's a backup plan at least. :-)

> Could we make a formal appeal for cash for expenses for getting 14.0.0
> out the door, with a specific target, if it's larger than what this list
> alone could be hoped to raise?  It would be very good to at least get
> the older deployments support for 14 before dropping some of them off.

Probably.  I'm not sure how to approach this yet; give me some time to
think it over.

> Do we know which releases are more commonly deployed organizationally?
> I would assume the LTS releases, but such obvious assumptions prove
> incorrect all the time -- one sufficiently large deployment using, say,
> Meerkat, could make that a higher priority for us than Lucid.  Do we
> have statistics on which versions get hit up for updates most
> frequently?  Is there a better measure than that that we might use,
> given that many deployments might not update frequently at all?

A public poll is all I can think of.  As you said, many institutions will
not upgrade often, which skews the statistics on this end.  Add in local
mirrors (at least one TDE deployment I am aware of does this) and I have
no valid data on which to base a decision.

Tim