Re: st: Re: Listing user-written ado files called by program

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

It does no harm, and it is often recommended, to cite user-written
programs as you would cite academic and professional literature using
Stata Technical Bulletin, Stata Journal, SSC or other references.
Every SSC package has a corresponding URL.

I'd also assert that every serious user-written program has a help
file, and in that help file it certainly mentions whatever else that
is user-written that it depends on.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Partho Sarkar <partho.ss@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you Nick!  Yes, you are quite right, the user-written files are
> in a separate directory, in sub-directories categorized by first
> letter: c:\ado\plus\ on my system.  Except of course some files I
> downloaded from the web apart from SSC, which are in c:\ado\personal .
>  (By the way, I didn't mean to imply -ssc- install was haphazard-only
> that it follows the same alphabetical sub-directory structure as the
> Base & Updates directories!)
>
> Incidentally, what, if any, are the norms for crediting the original
> writers of these user-written files?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Partha S. Sarkar
>
> From      Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>
> To        statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject           Re: st: Re: Listing user-written ado files called by program
> Date      Wed, 7 Sep 2011 07:52:38 +0100
>
> I don't think there is an easy way to do this.
>
> The fact that Stata treats user-written programs as almost on a par
> with official ones means that it doesn't discriminate finely as long
> as it finds a program on its -adopath-.
>
> However, you are not quite right.
>
> As one of the original authors of -ssc- I have to defend it against
> any implication that it puts stuff all over the place! It is
> systematic about where it places code.
>
> If you have followed advice, the user-written ados are those not in
> what -adopath- calls UPDATES and BASE, so a brute-force solution is to
> copy all your user-written ados to your clients. In modern computing
> terms, they won't notice the extra file usage and the programs they
> don't use won't matter.
>
> Alternatively, teach your clients to use -ssc-.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Partho Sarkar <partho.ss@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This may be a common situation:
>>
>> Like most Stata users, I have accumulated a number of user-written
>> programs (mostly downloaded from the SSC server, but also some other
>> sources).  In a program I have written, I implicitly use some of these
>> user-written programs via commands (e.g., rtfutil, listtab etc.).  I
>> have to share this program with other colleagues/clients, who
>> obviously will not have these downloaded programs.  So I would like to
>> include a note with my program listing all the user-written programs
>> which my program uses.  Since there are many of these, in several of
>> my sub-routines spread over do files, it would be quite tedious to
>> manually track them down one-by-one.  Any suggestions?
>>
>> (I cannot just list all the user-written programs I have on my
>> computer, because I don't use them all in this program!   Also, even
>> finding which of the programs in my Stata ado path are user-written,
>> would be quite difficult, as -ssc install- puts them all in different
>> sub-directories, and after several updates, even the dates of the
>> files will not reveal their origin.  A brute force solution might be
>> to try and run my program on a computer with  Stata newly installed,
>> and checking the error messages.  I am hoping there may be some other
>> way!)
>>

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