RE: FW: tell us about what you'd like to do for PSPP

[Ronald Szoc, PhD]

Ben--

Thank you... I downloaded the code (but not from Savannah, which has the
most recent, so I may do that again).... John suggested trying out some
procedures and finding bugs, and then quashing them. That is one way to get
familiar with the code. 

I also noticed that some of the notes in the code say things such as
"spearman's rho is not computing correctly" or something similar... 

What I would like to do initially, is to get very familiar with the code. If
PSPP is still a console app, then I think we need to discuss how to make it
a GUI app. (I myself took a long time to get to GUI, and when I tell people
- when I'm trouble-shooting - "I want to get at the command line", most of
them now say: "Why????"... )... 

One of the things that SPSS does (I suspect, don't know for sure) is to
generate a series of command line statements based on GUI menu choices (
strange but true, and kind of an elegant solution to a problem, no?), and
then processes that command line. 

But first, let me get into the code... I have a laptop where I have
configured Gentoo Linux and could use that as a development machine, and I
will put PSPP on that... E

Thanks fr approving me. I hope that I can make a real contribution... 


Ron 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Pfaff [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Ben Pfaff
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 7:08 PM
To: Ronald Szoc, PhD
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: FW: tell us about what you'd like to do for PSPP

Ron--

Thanks for the very thorough bio.  It sounds like you're more qualified to
work on PSPP than I am.

If your skill deficiencies are in Linux, it may not be a problem--some of
our developers use Windows.  In particular I'm told that PSPP builds fine
under the Cygwin system.  I'm not aware whether anyone has tried to make it
build under, say, Visual C++, but the biggest challenge there would probably
be the build system, not the code.

If you have trouble getting anything to build, let us know.  It could be
that we just need to explain some things better in the documentation.

Now comes what is usually the hard part for me: suggesting something to work
on.  I'm not good at that.  I always just work on what interests me the most
and it's hard for me to tell what that might be for others.  I'm interested
in lots of things so it's hard for me to say "please do this" because
usually it's something I want to do too and just haven't had the time :-)

One good way to get started might be to pick a statistical procedure that
PSPP lacks (there are many) and implement it.  You mentioned a couple of
"infrastructure" type projects as well, i.e. factoring out common operations
into a library.  If you wanted to do that, it's a good idea, but it would
require reading a lot of PSPP code to come up to speed.

If anything sounds of interest, say so; otherwise we can try to discuss it
on the list here to find something.

I approved your application by the way.

Ben

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