Bill Gould said,
Stata cannot tell case 2 from case 3, but case 1 is certainly
distinguishable.
Stata could, in case 1, go ahead and remove the old A directory entry
which,
in fact, serves no purpose. Case 1 is the most common case, to boot.
That
sounds better to me, but it bothers me a little that Stata's behavior
becomes
a little unpredictable beforehand. Do you need to uninstall the old
A? With
the improvement, only if it is still there and you know you don't want
it.
Yes, I don't want an old package lying around haunting my computer.
Another altnernative would be to recognize that case 3 rarely happens
and, if
authors do a good job constructing packages, should never occur. You
must
remember that we wrote -net install- *BEFORE* we knew how users would
use it.
Anyway, case 3 is rare, so let's forget it, and change -replace- to
mean
-uninstall-, so the command would work just as David expects.
I can see some valid concern for scenerio 3. But I see these types of
modifications as being personal, or if meant to be shared, given
another version name like xi2, xi3, etc (xin would halt this inexorable
progression).
I suggest that we leave the decision up to Kit Baum <[email protected]>.
Kit nows
better than any of us how packages look and so can better evaluate the
frequency of case 3.
OK.
-Dave
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