PSPP 0.4.0 released

[Ben Pfaff]

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PSPP 0.4.0 is now available on ftp.gnu.org.  You may download it via
        ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/pspp-0.4.0.tar.gz
It should propagate to mirrors over the next few days.

You may validate it by checking the release against my public key,
which is available in the Debian keyring and elsewhere.  The same
key is used to sign this announcement.

What is PSPP?
=============

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 development is ongoing. It already supports a large subset of
SPSS's transformation language.  Its statistical procedure support is
currently limited, but growing.

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
   
Questions and comments regarding PSPP can be sent to address@hidden
PSPP bug reports may be sent to address@hidden or filed in the
bug-tracking system at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=pspp
according to your preference.

Release Notes
=============

A few system-specific issues have been noted.  These may be PSPP bugs
or system bugs; we have not yet been able to track them down precisely:

    * On Solaris, one or more tests may fail `make check'.  We have
      only seen this reported on Solaris 9 with GCC 3.4.2.  Our
      reporter says that turning off optimization (with -O0) at least
      masked the symptoms.

    * On Mac OS X, GCC 4.0.0 build 4061 has been observed to cause
      some tests to fail.  Later builds should work fine.

Finally, a few extra notes:

    * The Sun WorkShop compiler will not work out of the box in this
      release.  Use GCC instead.  We will fix this for the next
      release.

    * GCC 4.x reports an inordinate number of warnings for this
      release.  You may ignore these for now.  We will fix these for
      the next release.

News
====

Changes from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0:

  Changes in build dependencies:

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

    * 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.

    * libgmp2 is no longer a dependency.

  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.

  Some reports state that Texinfo 4.8, the latest version, may be
  necessary to successfully format the documentation on some systems.

- -- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org
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