RE: st: adoupdate question

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 12:25 PM 6/30/2009, Nick Cox wrote:

> 1. Help files have changed in suffix and within 
> SMCL there have been numerous changes. None of 
> this is fatal but it can prove challenging 
> especially for naïve or inexperienced users.

That is my biggest concern with Alan's proposed 
strategy.  I think you want separate help files 
for each version of the program unless the 
differences across versions are minor, e.g. maybe 
the syntax is the same but a later version is faster because it uses Mata.

> Thus without disputing the value of the strategy 
> which Alan identifies I find it usually easier 
> to peal off old programs as say -foobar10- if 
> -foobar- is much revised under 11 and I lack the 
> time or the incentive to maintain support for 
> users 10 within -foobar-. (Indeed I suspect that 
> this particular convention that the number 
> indicates Stata version required, rather than 
> version of the program, was introduced by me.) 
> -foobar10- is then announced as "frozen as was" 
> and the implication is that people on Stata 11 
> should not download the new -foobar- as the old -foobar- is all they can use.

I don't think Alan's proposal is inconsistent 
with that though.  You can still freeze the code 
for old versions.  But, you can keep giving the 
command -foobar- instead of -foobar10-.

With Alan's approach, I suppose a wildly 
ambitious programmer could also support version 
control, although I am not aware of a single 
user-written program that does that.


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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