Re: pspp 0.04, users, datafile

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 10:55:44PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Jaap-Andre de Hoop <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > Altough I am not a developer I subscribed to this list, because there
     > seems no user-list and I want to stay informed about PSPP. 
     
     That's fine.  You're welcome to ask your questions here.

If there is sufficient interest and a volunteer to administrate such
a list, I see no reason why we can't have a pspp-users list.  The only
reason there hasn't been one up to now is lack of demand.

     > I think one disadvantage of the pspp project is that little attention
     > is given to the user information:
     > ChangeLog is a very technical changelog, not very usefull for 'ordinary' 
users.
     > I understood that an new version of pspp is coming 'soon'. I wonder if
     > there is an overview of the new features/new supported syntax.
     
     Before we release the next version, we will update the NEWS
     file, which is more user friendly.

The Changelog is not intended for the benefit of users.  However
I understand Jaap-Andre's position: It's going to be a non-trivial
task to extract the information from Changelogs (there's more than one
of them) to make a NEWS file.  Maybe we should start drafting the
next NEWS file now.

     > Road map on what functionality are we concentrating in the near future
     > (system file that now is comparable with spss 6?, addition with
     > variable width commando (spss10?))
     
     I am happy to add features that our users want to use.  If you
     can tell me more about these, then I will consider them as higher
     priorities than otherwise.

A 'Road Map' or some kind of plan for future development, would at
least give us some objective.  So long as people realise that there's
no full time developers at the moment.

If somebody has the time to do it, I think it would be a good idea to
organise some kind of online survey, to get user feedback.  Find out
things like: What features do users use the most?  What missing
features would be most desirable? How often do they use PSPP ? etc,
etc.   And of course, the survey results should be analysed using
PSPP.


John


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