Re: Development plans?

[John Darrington]

Hello John,

Many thanks for your interest.  Your questions are about development of PSPP so 
are certainly on topic here.  To answer them to the best of my ability:

1. I don't think we actually wrote "we don't need money" :)  We did start a
dialogue with the FSF and some other organisations to set up a targetted 
donations account, but that seems to have stalled.  This was intended to gather
donations from persons who wished to contribute (say) $15 -- it would go into a
fund until we had enough to do something with it.  

But the situation you are describing is a little different.  For organisations 
who wish to contract the development of a new feature, there is a company that 
undertakes such work:  http://cellform.com (disclaimer: I am associated with 
this enterprise).  Several features (for example the Perl module) came into 
existence this way.

2. The closest thing to a prioritised list of development wishes is the bug
tracker: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp  (sort by Severity and/or 
Release). If you decide to start work on one of these, I suggest that you 
discuss it on this list, and then set its status in the tracker to "In 
Progress".
Priorities however are subjective - some people think that certain things
are important, other people have other ideas  - at the end of the day, things
get done in the order which interests the developers, or by contract per above.

Did you have something particular in mind that you wanted to contribute?  
Multi-Way
anova has been "almost finished" for a while now.  It just needs some final 
attention
before we can say that it is done.  Perhaps you would like to look at that.

Regards,


John



On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 03:18:23PM +1300, John Williams wrote:
     Hello, I'm a new member of this list, and am considering the ways in which
     I can best contribute to the development of PSPP.  I've been searching the
     web for some information about development plans, but cannot find what I'm
     after.  I have, of course, read the material at
     
     https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/contribute.html
     
     but I still have a couple of questions.
     
     I work at a university where I teach statistics, and I really want to point
     my students at PSPP in preference to SPSS.  For what we need to teach, PSPP
     is mostly sufficient, but there are one or two features missing.  And, of
     course, only one missing feature is enough to mean that PSPP is not
     adequate for the needs of our students.
     
     So, my questions are:
     
     1. When someone has written on the page referred to above that you don't
     need money, is that still true?  If I convinced my University to "donate"
     $5,000 if you would only implement (for example) Variable Sets, or
     hierarchical cluster analysis, would that really not help?
     
     2.  If I want to contribute code (or documentation, or icons), is there are
     prioritised list of things that are needed?  Also, is there a list of
     things that are planned and currently being worked on, so I can avoid
     duplication of effort, and even better, spread the workload of whoever is
     currently working on that feature?
     
     Thanks for reading, and sorry if I should have asked these question in the
     user list, and not here.
     
     Best wishes to all the PSPP hackers,
     
     John

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