Re: What I've been working on

[Ben Pfaff]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 11:46 AM John Darrington
<john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 11:25:35AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      I haven't been too active on the PSPP mailing lists lately. It feels like
>      time to update the folks here about what I've been doing. I've continued 
> my
>      work on understanding SPSS output file formats, in two areas.
>
>      First, I've spent some time on understanding graphs and charts in .spv
>      files. These are a really complicated format, and I've made some limited
>      progress on it. It will take a lot more effort.
>
>      More recently, I've spent considerable time understanding the format of
>      .spo files. These are nontrivial, but not nearly as complicated as .spv
>      files (far fewer subformats, for one thing). I am making progress.
>
>
> That's good to hear.  (However, I don't know what are the respective
> purposes of .spo and .spv files are and how those purposes differ).

The .spo file format is obsolete and historical. I'm working on it for
completeness' sake and because I enjoy figuring out file formats.

The .spv file format is the one that SPSS currently uses.

>       Is it time to release the next version of PSPP? Does anyone know of 
> current
>      instabilities that would bar release for the moment?
>
> It has become apparent that some of my fixes to those recent fuzzing
> bugs are imperfect and need to be rethought.  I will try to do that
> within the next week or two.
>
> But yes, looking at NEWS, I see that a lot of things have happened since
> the last release and we need to think about making a new one.

OK.

It would be nice to hear from you when you think that the stability
is high enough again, so that we can do a release then.