Add support for SPSS & PSPP formats

[bojo42]

Binary package hint: shared-mime-info

SPSS is a proprietary program to analyze statistical data, mostly used by social sciences. Since version 16.0 this app finally gained linux support. On the free side we have a clone called PSPP that aims for compatibility and is in universe.

Sadly the formats used by those apps are not correctly detected by Ubuntu, means there seems to be no mime types for them. So you can work with SPSS or PSPP, but you can't associate the produced file types to them. Therefore we should fix that for a overall better support for those files important to many social scientists. This would ease migration from Windoze for this kind of people.

The files are:
.sav - native data format
.por - portable data format
.sps - syntax format
.spv - output format (new introduced with SPSS 16.0, the old format was .spo)

[bojo42 (bojo42)]

Intrepid detects them as the following:

gvfs-info *.sav | grep -i content
  standard::content-type: application/octet-stream
  standard::fast-content-type: application/octet-stream

gvfs-info *.por | grep -i content
  standard::content-type: text/plain
  standard::fast-content-type: application/octet-stream

gvfs-info *.sps | grep -i content
  standard::content-type: text/plain
  standard::fast-content-type: application/octet-stream

gvfs-info *.spv | grep -i content
  standard::content-type: application/zip
  standard::fast-content-type: application/octet-stream

[bojo42 (bojo42)]

Files i created with both programms. Because i don't know how far they may differ, i typed in the same content in both to find possible differences more easily.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, that's an upstream request and should be sent to bugs.freekdesktop.org by somebody knowing this format and using it

[Ben Pfaff (blp-cs)]

Created an attachment (id=24198)
Patch to add SPSS mime types

The SPSS "save file" and "portable file" formats are data file formats supported by GNU PSPP (http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp), which is free software that understands the same language as the proprietary statistical software SPSS.

I am attaching a patch that adds the mime type information to freedesktop.org.xml.in and test information to tests/list. I will also attach files tests/test.sav and tests/test.por for use in the tests.

[Ben Pfaff (blp-cs)]

Created an attachment (id=24199)
tests/test.sav for testing application/x-spss-sav

[Ben Pfaff (blp-cs)]

Created an attachment (id=24200)
tests/test.por for testing application/x-spss-por

[Ben Pfaff (blp-cs)]

I have now submitted a bug report at freedesktop.org that requests adding MIME type support for .sav and .por: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20834

[Bastien Nocera (hadess-deactivatedaccount)]

I removed the *.sys glob, because it seemed too generic to me.

* freedesktop.org.xml.in:
* tests/list:
* tests/test.por:
* tests/test.sav: Patch from Ben Pfaff <email address hidden>
to add SPSS portable and save formats mime-types (Closes: #20834)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the upstream bug has been fixed now

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is a newer version fixing the issue in karmic now