Trouble with updating some community-contributed packages: palettes, colrspace and pr0046

[Hemanshu Kumar]

I am doing

ado update, update verbose

to update community-contributed packages. In a first run of this, several packages were updated. Subsequently however, when I re-run the command, I am told there are packages that need to be updated, but when it tries to do so, it finds the packages are already up-to-date. Here is the relevant output:

ado update, update verbose

... list of packages and their status ...

Packages to be updated are

   [26] palettes     -- 'PALETTES': module to provide color palettes, symbol palettes, and line pattern palettes
   [27] colrspace    -- 'COLRSPACE': module providing a class-based color management system in Mata
   [68] pr0046       -- SJ9-1 pr0046.  Row rank and sort a set of variables

Installing updates ...

   [26] palettes

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> . net set ado PLUS
-> . ssc install palettes, replace
checking palettes consistency and verifying not already installed...
all files already exist and are up to date.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   [27] colrspace

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> . net set ado PLUS
-> . ssc install colrspace, replace
checking colrspace consistency and verifying not already installed...
all files already exist and are up to date.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   [68] pr0046 using pr0046_1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> . net set ado PLUS
-> . net install pr0046_1, from(http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj20-2) replace force
nothing to install
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cleaning up ... Done

As further info, I get

*! version 1.2.7  23may2024  Ben Jann

if I check which colorpalette

What might be the problem, and what would be a way out?

[Nick Cox]

As the author of pr0046 and pr0046_1 I note that pr0046_1 consists of extra files; none of the files in pr0046 is changed in the update.

[Hemanshu Kumar]

Yes, I noticed that Nick, thanks for confirming. I tried

net get pr0046_1.pkg

to install the ancillary files, and then run ado update again, but it still thinks it needs to update the package.

Perhaps the ado update code needs to be modified by Stata Corp to work correctly when updates consist solely of ancillary files?

I'm not sure if the problem with the other two packages is similar. Perhaps Ben Jann can shed some light on this?

[Ben Jann]

I observe the same behavior: adoupdate keeps flagging colrspace and palettes as packages that need to be updated. Don't know what the problem is, but I think it can be safely ignored (i.e. adoupdate will install the latest version, even if after that it seems to forget that it did).

My observation is that ssc describe, which displays the package description found online, shows 20240705 as distribution date for both packages. However, according to ado describe, which displays the installed package description, the distribution date is 20220705. So my assumption is that something goes wrong with updating the local copy of the package description.

[Ben Jann]

Still don't know where the problem comes from, but I think you can solve it by uninstalling the packages and then reinstalling them. That is, type

.  ssc uninstall colrspace
.  ssc uninstall palettes

and then

.  ssc install colrspace
.  ssc install palettes

Now the local package descriptions should be correct so that adoupdate will no longer flag them.

[Richard Williams]

I've occasionally found programs that go into infinite update mode. When that happens I write Kit Baum and he applies some sort of fix and the problem goes away.