Re: my plans, for now

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 09:11:08PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     It's become more and more clear to me lately that the highest
     priority for PSPP is really getting the quality up.  Therefore,
     I'm going to spend all the time I have for PSPP on writing
     comprehensive tests and fixing the bugs that they find, until I
     decide that it's good enough.  

     After that, I think I'll start work on rewriting the output
     subsystem again, which still needs it.  My first attempt at that
     didn't work out, because it turns out I hadn't generalized the
     problem enough yet.

Recently I'd been using gcov to see how much of the code our test
suite actually exercises.  At the moment, the figure is about 50%
I'd estimate that about 20% of this figure is error handling code. The
rest is features that simply have not been tested.

Unfortunately, there's currently no sensible way to test the chart
output.  When we get around to the output engine again, I think this
should be on the list of requirements.

Maybe it's worth enabling the savannah task tracker so we know who's
working on what.  On the other hand, perhaps we haven't yet got enough
developers to make it worthwhile.

I think PSPP has come a long way in the last 12 months.  I believe
it's now stable enough to be `used' .  For me,  crashes are quite
rare,  and on the whole the system behaves itself.  The main show
stoppers are features that currently unimplemented.

Ben deserves a big round of applause for creating PSPP in the first
place, and for all the effort he's put into it. 


John

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