The short answer is No. As you say, user-written software can sometimes
be hacked, but that's not guaranteed to work.
As far as your relation with University IT people is concerned,
I'd try charm. My situation is that I visit the IT support people and do
the -update- with them.
Their report was that
(a) No-one had _ever_ previously offered to do this with _any_ software.
Many academics often treat them badly, giving peremptory requests or
instructions, which do not appear considerate or respectful of their
expertise and other commitments.
(b) They appreciated my input, which saved them a lot of time. There was
no need for them to look at unfamiliar documentation.
(c) They were pleasantly surprised that Stata was very easy to update.
Other software can be much more painful.
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Williams
> Is there any simple way to get Stata to override the version
> command and
> run programs written for a later version? Stata 8.0, Jan. 2003 is
> installed on some campus cluster machines, and unfortunately
> I am at the
> mercy of other people to get these updated. If my students
> download a
> program written for version 8.1 or 8.2 I would like it to run for
> them. The changes between 8.0 and 8.2 seem small enough that
> my guess is
> the vast majority or user-written routines will run fine in
> 8.0, especially
> for the fairly basic things I am covering now. You could, of
> course, just
> edit any ado files so they said 8.0, but I'd like to keep
> things as simple
> as possible. Thanks for any advice.
>
> In the future, I'll have to remember to get after the
> computing people to
> update things at least once a semester -- my guess is they
> don't even know
> that updates are possible and available.
*
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