st: re: ado file location in Macintosh OS X

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Michael said

	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:

     	PLUS:  ~/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/
	PERSONAL:  ~/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/personal/
	OLDPLACE:  ~/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/



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.

Kit

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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