Thanks for your comments, Kit. The primary examples that you and Alan have
used definitely make one question the true existence of a file on the web,
but these seem like a limited reason to deny the -confirm file- command
complete web access. I have no intention of ever using a "http:" address
that would do this (albeit it is possible), but rather I would take
advantage of sites specifically set up for use by me in Stata.
For example, one should be able to set up an adopath for a web site that
contains a central set of personal/custom ados. You could then run this
from anywhere in the world and know that you are always using the most
current versions. You should be able to use the "which" command with this
as well (another command that doesn't work with http probably due to the
same reason).
Now, I'm not your average user, but I do see the long-term benefits for
others of making this possible. Currently & locally, we keep our ados,
data, and profile.do's on a central server so that we don't have to
constantly update each computer individually. Now that we have 15+ users
across the world, we need something similar. I have created a useful ado
archive system (easier to update/maintain than the .toc & .pck system
especially since most files are customized for our data) so these users can
get the newer or older versions of any of our ado files; they are all on
the web, and so far with XP it appears to work well. It is for the
Win2k/Mac users that this becomes a problem. I also imagine that this will
be expanded to be a source of data files as well - it may be that we will
just need to map the web site(s) to local drives for security and ease of
use, but I thought you should at least know why this has become an issue
for us.
Also, I am still curious as to what Stata does to check the existence of
these web files checked using the -net- commands if -confirm file- isn't used.
Kaleb Michaud
Arthritis Research Center
At 07:18 AM 5/21/2003 -0400, you wrote:
I agree with Alan -- one can get many responses from a properly-configured
web server that include a positive number of bytes, but are not what you
thought was there.
So what should we conclude, ye philosophers out there, about the existence
of the file I requested from www.stata.com? It would seem that one would
have to "read" (or at least mechanically interpret) the contents of the
result file to see if they make any sense. I don't see that as a great
advantage of being able to confirm the existence of a remote file.
Kit
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