Schemes haven't been documented yet for good reasons,
because they are not yet stable. That is, StataCorp
are following the logic Constantine mentions. They
don't want to provide documentation which will then
later be broken. However, scheme documentation was
promised at the Boston meeting as coming pretty soon.
The same is true of many other things. None of the
low-level graphics stuff is documented at all. The
alternative of documenting _everything_ that is not
proprietary would undoubtedly bloat the manuals further,
most of the information however being too arcane
for almost all users.
Also, freezing Stata between releases, apart from
fixes, commits StataCorp to elephantine pregnancies
and deprives keen users of lots of nice things in the
interim. Just witness how interested several people are
in the enhancements to -ci, binomial-.
So I disagree here with Constantine.
More importantly, he and others agreeing have some degree
of choice here, e.g. choosing not to -update- or (more
realistically) just choosing not to use new features
added since release (but how are these known about if
they are not documented?).
Nick
[email protected]
Constantine Daskalakis is discontented:
> I've had exactly the same problem it seems. After spending 2
> hours trying
> to figure out what I was doing wrong and a couple of messages
> to Stata tech
> support, here's the final answer (haven't had the chance to
> check that out yet):
>
> At 02:56 PM 8/31/2004, Stata Technical Support wrote:
>
> >Constantine,
> >
> >The structure of the schemes has changed. You shouldn't use
> the file named
> >"s2color.scheme" as your model. Instead, you need to use
> "scheme-s2color.
> >scheme" which can be found in the same folder (C:\Program
> Files\Stata8\ado\
> >\updates\s).
>
> I am quite annoyed with Stata lately. It seems that there are
> far too many
> "enhancements" and "features" that are undocumented or plain
> contradictory
> to what the manual says. I do not want to waste hours of my
> time to read
> the manual and do things right and then have that all go down
> the drain
> just because Stata have decided to redo the whole thing and
> forgot to tell anyone.
>
> Major changes that go against the manual should be reserved for new
> versions, NOT updates (unless it is to fix something that is
> really wrong).
> But perhaps, it's just my nature to gripe.
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