This message brings to mind one of my pet peeves with the way Stata
installs on a Mac: by placing the directory for PLUS / PERSONAL /
OLDPLACE ado files in the user's home directory, one of Apple's
guidelines concerning the location of application installed files --
"Don't Pollute User Space" -- is violated.
...
IMHO, the following is more consistent with Apple's guidelines for
the file system:
I agree with Michael's point, and well-behaved third-party apps such
as BBEdit indeed put their stuff into the user's personal Library/
Application Support directory. I imagine that the reason that Stata
does not is a (possibly foolish) consistency with other flavors of
Unix and Linux on which Stata runs. There is no equivalent in a
standard Unix or Linux filesystem to a personal Library/App Support
directory. The closest approximation is a .hidden directory, and if
you have the console version of Stata involved, you will have
a .stata9 directory as I do in ~. But a hidden directory (really
hidden, not just hidden from the Finder) is not a handy place for
unwashed users to examine. So I suppose when Stata was ported to OS X
(the first multi-user version of Mac OS), they decided to parallel
the Unix/Linux convention of creating ~/ado, even though Steve Jobs
disapproved.
But as Michael suggests there is nothing preventing a Mac OS X user
from redefining PLUS, PERSONAL, OLDPLACE; she must just be careful to
note that if she works on a different Mac OS X machine the -net
install- files will not be in the customized location.
