Re: copyright assignments complete--green light for 0.4.0

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 09:20:00AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>
>      Does anyone have anything that they want to get into 0.4.0, or
>      anything that they want to test more thoroughly before 0.4.0?  
>
> I'd like to get to the bottom of this beta/f dist issue.  Also, I
> wondered if it's worth having a look at bug #11677 (MATCH FILES).  If
> it's too difficult to fix before the release, then I suggest that
> MATCH FILES is removed from the list of implemented transformations,
> since it's unusable at the moment.

Okay, I'll look into that soon.  I think I might have looked at
this a little while ago and decided that a good deal of work was
needed.  I don't know whether I have time to fix it before
release, but I'll try.

>      John, are you pretty confident about the quality of your recent
>      check-in?  I haven't had a chance to look at it yet.
>
> I'm fairly confident that it's correct, although the implementation
> could be polished a bit. 

I want to rewrite the system file reader routines in a way
similar to how I rewrote the portable file routines (using
longjmp() and pool allocation).  It simplified and clarified a
lot of code.

> I think it would be a good idea for others to try it out ---
> particularly those who may have different version of spss than
> I.

I'd like to create a library of system files that make use of the
various features that they have (compressed/not compressed,
weighted/unweighted, etc.) or stress limits (are very small/very
large, lots of variables/few variables, etc.) or were produced by
various SPSS versions or on various systems (big endian/little
endian at least) and add checks that we handle them properly to
our test suite.  They'd also have to be free, as opposed to, say,
example system files that can be downloaded from spss.com.

This would be a lot of work so I'm probably not going to do it
soon.
-- 
Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff
on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
        -- Linus Torvalds