Re: pspp development

[Jason Stover]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 06:59:04AM +0800, John Darrington wrote:
> It might be worth re-drafting that proposal, since we've moved on a
> bit in the last 12 months anyway. I'm not sure what Jason's plans are
> with lib/linreg  --- I'd assumed that lib/linreg was supposed to be a
> general purpose linear regression library which could be applied to
> any software.  But I note that there are some very PSPP specific
> things there now (eg: #include "var.h").

I originally meant lib/linreg to be a general purpose linear
regression library, ignorant of variable structures and other features
specific to PSPP. But that approach made regression.q too complicated,
so I made the linreg library aware of variable/value structure and
xnmalloc. That makes coding other procedures that use linreg
easier. The approach also makes linreg more dependent on PSPP, but
only through the variable/value structures and xnmalloc.

I intend to use linreg in other procedures, too. I'm not sure where it
belongs in the new directory tree. Maybe there should be a 'statlib'
library with subdirectories for statistical libraries; something
eventually designed to make contributing easier for statistical
programmers who do not know about PSPP internals. 

> 
> I take it your plan would be to have each directory compiled as a
> static library, and linked into the binary at the end?  And what about
> header file search paths?  Currently, *every* file in *every*
> directory searches *every* directory for it's *.h #includes.  IMHO
> this is wrong, and would be cumbersome for such a large number of
> directories. So this would need to be thought about.

Yes, I thought each statistical library should have its own directory,
then be linked statically to make it available to multiple procedures.

And I agree with John's comment about the cumbersome searching through all
the different directories.

-Jason