PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It
-interprets commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output
-in ASCII or PostScript 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 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.
-Source code for the latest development release of PSPP is available at
-ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp
-
For information on differences from previous versions, please see file
-NEWS. Full documentation on PSPP's language and information on known
-bugs can in the doc/ directory.
+NEWS.
-Questions and comments regarding PSPP can be sent to Ben Pfaff
-<blp@gnu.org>. PSPP bug reports should be sent to
-bug-gnu-pspp@gnu.org.
+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
+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, 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:
+
+ * All of the SPSS transformation language. PSPP already
+ supports a large subset of it.
+
+ * All the statistical procedures that someone is willing to
+ 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. 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
+ output in ASCII, PostScript, and HTML formats. We will
+ enhance PSPP's output formatting in the future.
+
+ * Good documentation. Currently the PSPP manual describes its
+ language completely, but we would like to add information on
+ how to select statistical procedures and interpret their
+ results.
+
+ * 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. 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
+following:
+
+ * Easy-to-use support for parsing language syntax. Currently,
+ parsing is done by writing "recursive descent" code by hand,
+ with some support for automated parsing of the most common
+ constructs. We wish to improve the situation by supplying a
+ more complete and flexible parser generator.
+
+ * Easy-to-use support for producing attractive output.
+ Currently, output is done by writing code to explicitly fill
+ in table cells with data. We should be able to supply a
+ more convenient interface that also allows for providing
+ machine-readable output.
+
+ * Eventually, a plug-in interface for procedures. Over the
+ short term, the interface between the PSPP core and
+ statistical procedures is evolving quickly enough that a
+ plug-in model does not make sense. Over the long term, it
+ may make sense to introduce plug-ins.
projects / pspp-builds.git / blobdiff