I don't think that's true at all. I've done this, Ben Jann does it a
lot, and I'm sure there are other examples.
My main point, which may be at risk of being lost under a mass of
detail, is that I often find it practical to segregate and freeze old
versions. The defence for that is, largely, that it is practical and
time-saving. Once -foobar8- has been peeled off I almost never need to
think about it again. I make the users of Stata 8 (possibly up) suffer a
little insofar as if they stay on the old -foobar- and then use
-adoupdate- they may find their usable -foobar- program overwritten by
an unusable program. But they can fix that by installing -foobar8- and
editing their do files and scripts that used -foobar-. The example holds
"for any value of 8".
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Williams
With Alan's approach, I suppose a wildly
ambitious programmer could also support version
control, although I am not aware of a single
user-written program that does that.
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