Stephen Jenkins <[email protected]> reports that after installing the
latest ado update and NOT exiting Stata, he cannot draw the new sunflower
plots,
> I have -update-d to 30 Sept ado, which installs the new official
> -sunflower- command. Clicking on the examples in the help file
> leads to a graph with the axes and legend being drawn, but there is
> no sunflower itself drawn that I can see. Am I missing something
> (other than good eye sight)?
> [...]
Willard van Ooij <[email protected]> reports no problem and Stephen
and Willard have correctly concluded that the problem stems from not
restarting Stata.
Here is what is happening. When Stata does an ado update, it allows you to
continue running without restarting Stata. It does, however, clear from it's
internal memory store any ado programs that have been recently run. This way,
it will find and run any updated programs rather than continuing to run the
old program from its memory store. Stata did, however, retain in memory any
graphs, the current graph scheme, and current or stored estimates. The
problem Stephen encountered is that the current graph scheme has already
pre-loaded all of the named graph styles (such as the color red), but the new
sunflower plots requires some named styles that were new in this update.
When Stephen restarted Stata, the graph scheme was reloaded and the new named
styles became available. He could also have typed -discard- and that would
have cleared the graphs and forced a reload of the graphics scheme when the
next graph was drawn.
It turns out there could be a similar problem with current or save estimate
results. Imagine an ado update with changes to both an estimator and its
predictor. Imagine further that you ran the estimator, then typed -update
ado-, then typed -predict xyx, newopt-. If the predictor relies on a new
saved result from the estimator to produce -newopt- then it will fail because
the old estimator, used before the update, did not save things that were
needed to compute -newopt-.
We are leaning toward clearing more things whenever an ado update is done --
including all memory graphs, the graphics scheme, and the current and all held
estimates. This will address almost all of the possible conflicts, but it
will alter the session more than we would like. You still would not see any
changes to the Stata menu, this menu is currently only set when Stata starts.
As Stephen and Willard inferred, the best thing is to restart Stata after an
ado update, and we will change the message after -update ado- to suggest just
that.
-- Vince
[email protected]
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