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Re: st: smart autmoatic updates 2


From   Ulrich Kohler <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: smart autmoatic updates 2
Date   Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:05:33 +0100

Lars Korsholm wrote:
> Does anyone have experinces with network instalation of stata (linux or
> windows) and updating the executable while someone is actually is runnning
> a large stata job. I.e can computer adminstartor or root update stata
> while user xx has a stata session running? or will one of them fail?
> (here people sometimes run large simulations jobs, so I dont want to
> become unpopular ;-)
>
> If this is NOT a problem I'll be at rest :-)
>
> If this IS problem the built in stata command (linux only) -who- should
> have some
> return list, such that a program as described in "smart automatic updates
> 1" could check for other stata sessions before it tries to update stata!

Here are some wild guesses:

I think there are two questions to consider here. First, what happens, if you 
update the executable, if a user work with Stata at the same time, and, 
second what can happen to the user, while updating the ados. 

Second first: I once made an update, but failed to -update swap- afterwards, 
due to some reason. I than walked off for some days, and when I came back, a 
user said to me, that Stata issues something like "this is not the right 
executable". After I did an -update swap- Stata works again. What has happend 
most likely is, that an updated ado calls up the most recent executable, 
which was not there at that moment. Clearly this situation is not very 
likely, if the time between -update ado- and the completion of -update exe- 
is short (albeit still possible). However the probability of the problem 
increases with the time-span between -update ado- and -update swap-. Here is 
where the first question arises:

I always thought that it should be possible to update the executable while 
users running Stata. I always thought that while starting Stata, "wstata.exe" 
is loadad into computer memory and is not beeing called again. However, if 
this were true, you might get the error from updated ados described above. As 
it stands it seems that one cannot -update swap- when someone else works with 
Stata. But if this is true, there can be a big time lag between -update ado- 
and -update swap-, which might again force the errors described above.

It seems that it is very likely to become unpopular if you automatically 
install updates. However I am very curious if there is a solution for this.

uli


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