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re: Re: st: ado dir behavior bug?


From   David Airey <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   re: Re: st: ado dir behavior bug?
Date   Thu, 12 Jun 2003 16:40:40 -0500

Bill Gould said,

Stata cannot tell case 2 from case 3, but case 1 is certainly distinguishable.
Stata could, in case 1, go ahead and remove the old A directory entry which,
in fact, serves no purpose. Case 1 is the most common case, to boot. That
sounds better to me, but it bothers me a little that Stata's behavior becomes
a little unpredictable beforehand. Do you need to uninstall the old A? With
the improvement, only if it is still there and you know you don't want it.
Yes, I don't want an old package lying around haunting my computer.


Another altnernative would be to recognize that case 3 rarely happens and, if
authors do a good job constructing packages, should never occur. You must
remember that we wrote -net install- *BEFORE* we knew how users would use it.
Anyway, case 3 is rare, so let's forget it, and change -replace- to mean
-uninstall-, so the command would work just as David expects.
I can see some valid concern for scenerio 3. But I see these types of modifications as being personal, or if meant to be shared, given another version name like xi2, xi3, etc (xin would halt this inexorable progression).



I suggest that we leave the decision up to Kit Baum <[email protected]>. Kit nows
better than any of us how packages look and so can better evaluate the
frequency of case 3.
OK.

-Dave

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