Re: st: RE: how to create a stata package?

[Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- On Wed, 8/9/10, Carlo Fezzi wrote:
> I worked on some code to estimate multiple equation
> heteroskedastic Tobit models via Quasi Maximum Likelihood.
> Seems to work fine on my data and I would like it to
> transform it in a proper .ado file and make it available
> for download in a package on ssc.
> 
> Can anybody point out which are the required steps to do
> this?

Officially the only requirement is that you add an help-file.

The easiest way to get started with those is to look at 
examples. The obvious candidate is:

help examplehelpfile
viewsource examplehelpfile.sthlp

Something that I find very useful now, and I whish I had done
that from the very beginning, is to write certification 
scripts. These are just .do-files that check whether things
that should be true are actually true. I find that this 
process has two advantages:

I find it very useful to (semi-)systematically go through 
possible errors I could have made before I push the sent buttom.
I usually find a surprising number of small error this way, even
when I think I am "finished" (but that may also say something
about me...). Having the habit of writing certification scripts
"forces" me to take the time to do it. 

Also when updating my packages it is a great relief that my
update only changes things that I intended to change... (which
is not always that obvious, and a pre-existing certification 
script is great way to quickly check it in quite a bit of detail)

You can find out more by typing -help cscript- and look at
Bill Gould (2001) Statistical software certification. The Stata 
Journal, 1(1): 29--50.
<http://www.stata-journal.com/article.html?article=pr0001>

Hope this helps,
Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------


      

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