Re: no more PSPP for Windows?

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 01:17:22PM +0000, Quandt, Markus wrote:

  It has in my experience a nasty problem with the Windows output interface 
sometimes being very unresponsive, if you produce large outputs, but works fine 
for most every-day analyses and teaching, I would say. All Windows versions I 
ever used had the same problem, by the way, IIRC.


Any operation on PSPP which takes a long time is going to make the GUI
unresponsive for the time it takes to complete.  For example, processing
a very large number of cases, or generating very large ouput.

>From time to time we get requests to "fix" this.  Whilst might be possible
to provide a fix which would allow the GUI to remain responsive whilst
processing, the following caveats would still apply:

1. Until the procedure has completed, it would still not be possible to
start any new procedure.

2. Allowing the GUI to respond, would slow down the total time it takes
for the procedure to complete.

3. Such a change would not be simple and would take a lot of developer time.

For these reasons, such a fix has not been considered high priority.
Having said that, if anybody wishes to contribute such a fix then it'll
probably be accepted.

Also, although the problem exists on all systems (not only Windows) PSPP
runs magnitudes faster on GNU/Linux than on Windows, so I would suggest
that you try that instead.


     
  This being said, I was wondering myself whether there is a perspective for 
the pre-compiled Windows versions being brought up to date again. There 
definitely are some fixes and features missing in the Windows version by now.

Harry (who used to provide the Windows builds) has said that he doesn't
intend to do this any more.  However, I think his last build includes
the the most recent release 1.4.1  - any changes after that are not
released, and like any unreleased software you should think twice before
using it.

So far as whether any pre-compiled Windows binaries will be made publically
available depends on whether anyone volunteers to do the job.  Performing
the builds is not too onerous, but maintaining such a public service is harder
than one might imagine.  For a start, it is not just a build for "Windows".
Today there is Windows7, Windows10, WindowsCE ... then for each variant of
Windows there is today not only intel architectures to consider, but i386, AMD,
ARM and possibly others.  Then Harry found there was demand for debug and non
debug versions...  So that's 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 different binaries for each release.

At the end of the day, if you want a pre-compiled binary, it is far easier to
let OS vendor do it for you.  However, whereas most vendors are happy to
include PSPP in their distribution (see https://pkgs.org/download/pspp) I
suspect that if you wrote to Microsoft asking "Please include PSPP in the next
release of Windows" you probably would not receive a reply.

PSPP is a GNU project, and so supporting the GNU system comes first.  Other
free systems come second, and non-free systems such as Windows have the
lowest priority.