A question about Stata updates

[Dave Airey]

It's easy to determine if your Stata can be updated by typing update query. But is there a tool or command that queries whether a given command is up to date? Like adoupdate, but for official Stata? I have Stata installed locally and we also have a server version. The server version gets updated less frequently or by request. It would be nice to have a command that enables users to know if their commonly used commands have updates, to fuel a request for updates. An obvious answer is to read all the update files, but it would be nice to have something like adoupdate for official Stata.

[Nick Cox]

Not that I know of.

[Richard Williams]

It is a pain being at the mercy of others for updates. More than once, I've had to request updates for versions of Stata that are more than a year out of date. I suspect some of the people who do server maintenance don't even know Stata can be updated.

Even though you can't update the server version, you can type -update query-. It will tell you if the version is out of date, and let you view the whatsnew file. You could then skim through and see if anything you care about has changed since Stata was last updated.

[Nick Cox]

Richard is right. Note that all the whatsnew help files are accessible through a browser e.g.

https://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew
https://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew14to15
https://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew14

The pattern is

whatsnew -- since the most recent release
whatsnew14to15 -- what was introduced in Stata 15
whatsnew14 -- during the life of Stata 14 after the initial release

and so on.

[Clyde Schechter]

Tangential, but...

It is a pain being at the mercy of others for updates.

Amen, brother! That's why, even though I can use Stata for free through my institution's license, I purchase my own license and install it on my own computer.

[Dave Airey]

Thanks for the replies. I keep my local copy up to date and do my best to fight institutional inertia.

[Richard Williams]

I tend to harass tech people at the beginning of a semester, so my students are working with the most current version. I don’t want Tech to hate me so I let subsequent updates go unless I think they are really really critical.