-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.
+PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It 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.
+PSPP supports T-tests, ANOVA and GLM analyses, factor analysis,
+non-parametric tests, and other statistical features. PSPP produces
+statistical reports in plain text, PDF, PostScript, CSV, HTML, SVG,
+and OpenDocument formats.
-Instructions for installation are in INSTALL. Before you install
-PSPP, you will need to install certain prerequisites:
+PSPP has both text-based and graphical user interfaces. The PSPP
+user interface has been translated into a number of languages.
- * An ANSI C compiler and tool chain.
-
- * GNU make. Other make programs will not work.
-
- * 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.)
-
- * 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 is also included.
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.
-
- * 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.
+ * Friendly textual and graphical interfaces. This release
+ includes the first version of PSPPIRE, the PSPP graphical
+ user interface.
* Good documentation. Currently the PSPP manual describes its
language completely, but we would like to add information on
* 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
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.
+
+For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package note
+that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.
projects / pspp / blobdiff