[Gretl-announce] gretl-addons 1.0

gretl-addons-1.0 2011-02-24 This is a to announce a new element of gretl, introduced along with the 1.9.4 release. It may be relevant to people who build gretl themselves from the source code, and possibly also to those who package gretl for GNU/Linux distributions. Gretl >= 1.9.4 will include a set of "addons": these are function packages that extend gretl's functionality. Addons comprise a gfn file (a UTF-8 text file containing function definitions written in gretl's scripting language, but in an XML wrapper to facilitate fast loading), along with (in some cases) documentation in PDF format and various example scripts and/or relevant data files. Each addon lives in its own subdirectory under PREFIX/share/gretl/functions, where PREFIX is the path selected for the gretl installation. Addons differ from regular user-contributed function packages (for a description of which see the Gretl User's Guide) in that they are approved by the gretl authors and carry a commitment to continued maintenance; they also have their own menu entries in the gretl GUI, and can hold the sort of additional files mentioned above (notably PDF documentation). A path will be provided for users who wish to contribute addons or to "upgrade" existing function packages to addon status. In gretl 1.9.4 there are two addons: gig (extends gretl's GARCH functionality) and ivpanel (offers some instrumental-variables estimators for panel data). More will be added in later releases. The gretl 1.9.4 packages for MS Windows and Mac OS X include the addons. As for GNU/Linux, there are various ways of getting the addons: 1) They are available in pre-built form as zip archives. At present there are zip files for gig and ivpanel at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gretl/files/addons/1.9.4/ There's also a mechanism within gretl for auto-download and install of these files on demand. 2) They have their own sub-tree in gretl CVS. See http://gretl.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gretl/gretl-addons/ 3) We will release source packages ("tarballs") based on the CVS tree from time to time. Each announcement of a gretl release will include an indication of the compatible addons source package. A first such package can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gretl/files/addons/gretl-addons-1.0.tar.bz2 In CVS and addon-source releases one finds the usual GNU mechanism for configuring, building and installing. The release tarballs will in fact contain pre-built gfn and PDF files so that no real "build" is required; it should be sufficient to do, e.g., ./configure --prefix=/usr followed by either make install or, for packagers DESTDIR=/your/path make install Note that at present gretl addons fall in the "noarch" category -- though at some future point it may contain C code that requires compilation for variant architectures. -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University