In the latest official ado-file update available from StataCorp (type -update
query-), there is a new command that StataCorp has been promising us
for some time: -adoupdate-.
-adoupdate- does for the SSC what -update- does for official Stata: It
checks whether updates exist and, optionally, installs them. It does
this for more than just the SSC, including the Stata Journal, and in fact,
all user-written additions available from the Help menu. Its use should remove
a common source of difficulty with SSC-downloaded files: users do not have the
latest version of the file from SSC. With -adoupdate-, you can find out whether
new versions of any packages you have installed are available and, optionally,
install them.
I recommend you type -help adoupdate- to learn about it.
The first time you use -adoupdate-, I suggest you type
. adoupdate
rather than
. adoupdate, update
Without the -update- option, -adoupdate- merely tells what needs updating
on your computer. By the way, the first time you run -adoupdate-, it may
take a while to run. All of this is explained in -help adoupdate- under
the heading "Possible problems the first time you run adoupdate, and their
solutions". Actually, there aren't any problems, but you may need to be
patient.
Many of us -- me included -- have installed the same package over and
over again as we have heard about new versions. That's fine, but if
we had been super neat about things, we would have gone back and
deleted the the older versions. Stata doesn't care whether we did that,
however, so most of us didn't.
-adoupdate-, however, does care, because it doesn't want to check the
same package over and over again. -adoupdate- automatically removes
duplicates, so the first time you run it, you may see messages
like
(note: package ___ installed more than once; older copy removed)
and you will see those even if you specify -adoupdate- rather than
-adoupdate, update-. The first time I ran -adoupdate-, when Bill was
developing it, I got literally hundreds of messages like that. I just
want to reassure you: Nothing is wrong. Let it run.
I think users of the SSC Archive (and the Stata Journal, and other user sites)
will find -adoupdate- as useful as the official -update-. The -adoupdate- command
was written by Stata's chief software designer, Bill Gould, taking advantage of the Mata
language. Those who have heard Bill's presentations at SUG meetings know that
Mata is useful for much more than matrix manipulations! Many thanks to Bill for this effort
in support of user-written additions to the Stata toolkit.
Best wishes
Kit
Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
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