  In this talk we discuss the results obtained in the new approach that we
recently introduced to consider and include both the perturbative and
nonperturbative contributions to the evolution of the gluon and quark avarage
multiplicities. We report on our progresses in solving a longstanding puzzle of
QCD. The new formalism is motivated by recent important theoretical
developments in timelike small-x resummation which are also discussed mostly
from an historical point of view. We have extended our global analysis to fit
the available data adding the strong coupling constant as a fit parameter. In
this way our best fit gives $\alpha_s(M_z)=0.124\pm 0.005$ and for the
corresponding $\chi^2$ we have obtained a further improvement.
