PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It
-interprets commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output
-in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML format.
+is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
PSPP development is ongoing. It already supports a large subset of
-SPSS's transformation language. Its statistical procedure support is
-currently limited, but growing.
+SPSS's syntax. Its statistical procedure support is currently
+limited, but growing. At your option, PSPP will produce statistical
+reports in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML formats.
-Instructions for installation are in INSTALL. Before you install
-PSPP, you will need to install certain prerequisites:
-
- * An ANSI C compiler and tool chain.
-
- * The GNU Scientific Library (libgsl), version 1.6 or later,
- including libgslcblas included with GSL.
-
- * Perl, version 5.005_03 or later. (Perl is required during build
- but not after installation.)
-
- * pkg-config (only if you need to regenerate configure after
- modifying configure.ac).
-
- * Optional: libncurses. Without it, PSPP will assume it is
- running in an 80x25 terminal.
-
- * Optional: libreadline and libhistory. Without them, interactive
- command editing and history features will be disabled.
-
- * Optional: libplot (from GNU plotutils). Without it,
- graphing features will not work. If you do not have it
- installed, you must run `configure' with --without-libplot.
-
- * Optional: GTK+ version 2.6.0 or later, plus libglade 2.0 or
- later. Without them, the GUI will not be built. If you do not
- have these installed, you must run `configure' with
- --without-gui.
+Instructions for PSPP installation are in INSTALL, including a list of
+prerequisite packages and other PSPP-specific information. Full
+documentation on PSPP's language will be installed along with the
+programs.
For information on differences from previous versions, please see file
-NEWS. Full documentation on PSPP's language can be found in the doc/
-directory.
+NEWS.
Source code for the latest release of PSPP is available at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/. Older versions may be obtained from
-ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/. Development sources are available from
-CVS at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp
-
+ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/. Development sources are available
+at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp
+
+The following miscellaneous notes apply to this release:
+
+ * On a few operating systems, such as OpenBSD, some of the
+ tests may fail with messages similar to: 'Warning: cannot
+ create a convertor for "646" to "UTF-8"'. These test
+ failures may safely be ignored.
+
Questions and comments about using PSPP may be sent to pspp-users@gnu.org.
Bug reports may be filed at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp
-or emailed to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org. (We prefer the web-based system
-because it makes it more difficult for us to lose track of bugs.)
+or emailed to bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org. We prefer the web-based system
+because it makes it more difficult for us to lose track of bugs, but we
+are happy to hear from users through any means.
The long term goals for PSPP are ambitious. We wish to provide the
following support to users:
supports a large subset of it.
* All the statistical procedures that someone is willing to
- implement, whether they exist in SPSS or not. Currently,
- statistical support is limited, but growing.
+ implement, whether they exist in SPSS or not.
* Compatibility with SPSS syntax, including compatibility with
known bugs and warts, where it makes sense. We also provide
an "enhanced" mode in certain cases where PSPP can output
better results that may surprise SPSS users.
- * Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. PSPP does not do
- a good job of this yet.
+ * Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. This release
+ includes the first version of PSPPIRE, the PSPP graphical
+ user interface.
* Attractive output, including graphs, in a variety of human-
and machine-readable formats. PSPP currently produces
* Efficient support for very large data sets. For procedures
where it is practical, we wish to efficiently support data
sets many times larger than physical memory. The framework
- for this feature is already in place, but it has not been
- tuned or extensively tested.
+ for this feature is already in place. It has not been tuned
+ or extensively tested, however initial experience has given
+ impressive results.
Over the long term, we also wish to provide support to developers who
wish to extend PSPP with new statistical procedures, by supplying the
projects / pspp-builds.git / blobdiff