Re: my status

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 07:54:46PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > 1. I'm currently looking at extending system files to read/write string
     >    variables upto 32767 bytes in length, a la SPSS v13/v14.
     
     I hope we don't have any fixed-size buffers that expect to be big
     enough to hold any string.  I can't think of any off-hand, but
     it'd be bad if we did.

See the earlier discussion about list.q --- I think in that particular
case (and possibly in any others) the best thing to do would be to
truncate the string to fit the buffer.  Anyone who generates tables
using rediculously long strings is asking for trouble.
     
     > 3. When Ben's checked in the error code, I'll look at the gui
     >    again. Hopefully get the data sheet working with arbitrary length
     >    casefiles. Ben, some time ago, we discussed a case_reader_clone
     >    function in the context of implementing RANK.  I think the gui will
     >    require something similar.  Is this something simple to implement?
     
     It shouldn't be hard.  I'll flag it as something to do soon.
     
     I forgot to mention something else in my status report.  I'm
     planning to drastically simplify how PSPP is configured.
     Currently there's a hairy mess of environment variables,
     command-line options, multiple levels of defaults, and so on.
     There is way more than needed.  I'm planning to get rid of most
     of it.  That'll make life easier for everyone: developers won't
     have to look at complicated code and users won't have to
     understand complicated instructions in the manual.
     
     Any objections?

Suits me.

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