PSPP 0.4.0 release candidate 1 available

[Ben Pfaff]

PSPP 0.4.0 release candidate 1 is available from:
        http://xenon.stanford.edu/~blp/pspp-0.4.0rc1.tar.gz

If no one reports anything worth fixing within the next few days,
I'll rename this as 0.4.0, upload it to alpha.gnu.org, and send
up release announcements to the usual places.

P.C.J.G. Brunier: Can you grab the NEWS file and make sure that
the website has it?  I made a few updates tonight.  Thanks!

Changes from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0:

  New build dependencies:

    * The GNU Scientific Library (libgsl), version 1.6 or later.

    * The GNU multiprecision arithmetic library (libgmp).

    * libplot from GNU plotutils is optional.  Without it, the new
      graphing features will not work.  If you do not have it
      installed, you must run `configure' with --without-libplot.

  Newly implemented commands and statistical features:

    * EXAMINE, including its graphing features.

    * FREQUENCIES now supports percentiles.

    * ONEWAY.

    * PERMISSIONS.

    * SHOW.

    * SORT CASES now sorts stably, that is, two cases with equal sort
      criteria will be in the same relative order before and after the
      sort.

    * T-TEST (re-written).

    * DATE and USE.  These commands are parsed but otherwise ignored,
      to enhance compatibility with certain command files that invoke
      them unnecessarily.

    * VARIABLE WIDTH, VARIABLE ALIGNMENT, and VARIABLE LEVEL.  These
      currently have no effect on PSPP output, but their values are
      written to and read from system files and thus may affect
      third-party software.

    * SET EPOCH implemented.

    * DATA LIST FREE and DATA LIST LIST now support arbitrary field
      delimiters.

    * FILE HANDLE now supports custom tab widths.

  Long variable names (and other identifiers) are now supported.  Up
  to the first 64 bytes of each identifier is significant.  PSPP now
  reads and writes system files compatible with SPSS version 12.

  New --algorithm and --syntax command line options allow
  SPSS-compatible or enhanced modes to be selected.

  Support for transformation expressions has been rewritten and
  significantly improved.  Refer to the manual for details.

  Calculation of moments (mean, standard deviation, kurtosis,
  skewness) has been rewritten and should now be more accurate.  In
  --algorithm=enhanced mode moments may be more accurate than SPSS in
  some cases.

  Numerous bugs have been fixed, too many to mention here.  Many new
  tests have been added, leading to the discovery and fixing of many
  of these bugs.

  The ASCII output driver can now squeeze multiple blank lines into
  single blank lines.

  Much of the code has been rewritten and refactored.  It is now much
  cleaner.

  The FILE TYPE and REPEATING DATA commands have been disabled for
  this release because their implementations were deemed too buggy to
  be useful.  They will be fixed and replaced in a future release.

  New pspp-mode for Emacs (in pspp-mode.el).

  Added rudimentary command-line completion for interactive input.

  lib/julcal and lib/dcdflib are no longer used, so they have been
  removed.

  For developers, the build system now requires Autoconf 2.58 and
  Automake 1.7.  The included gettext has been updated to version
  0.12.1.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org