I'm somewhat puzzled at the response to this thread. I appreciate Mr Merkey has greatly annoyed many people in the past, but I know he's putting in effort to work better with others now; and I'm not saying Assume Good Faith In The Face Of All Reason (there are many people whose names I never want to see in my Wikipedia email ever again) - but that first mail read to *me* like a Wikimedia bug report (problems reading data dumps), which only needs redirection to wikitech.
So, um, could everyone please just take a deep breath? And if there's a problem with the current dumps, I'm sure the devs would rather know than not know, and politely directing people to the right list is a better response even if it was sent by Lir or Wik or Plautus Satire or something.
(And I know I'm way guilty of blowing my top inappropriately on the lists of late and do apologise again and will calm down and settle into middle-aged suburban existence soon, I swear.)
- d.