just before midnight in cambridge, a serious incident happened on the cambridge ctan node, resulting in the loss of much of the macros/latex/contrib tree. because of the nature of the incident, the losses propagated to the other ctan sites.

i have since then been doggedly restoring stuff from backups (not easy, since it involves juggling files across three machines), but at 0530, i'm starting to fail.

i've made quite a lot of headway, but there is stil much to do -- i shall restart when i've had a bit of sleep.

apologies to one and all.

robin fairbairns