Adding StataStan unstable distribution page to github

[Robert Grant]

Some of you will have seen discussion on github with William Buchanan. It all seems to work OK from his wbuchanan.github.io so I'm happy to add it onto ours. But I haven't done gh-pages before so want to check I'm getting this right. There's a bunch of files that Stata will look for at a URL in order to install inside Stata. That should be at github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/statastan right??? And then is it on the master or the gh-pages branch? Any advice welcome.

[Daniel Lee]

Hi Robert,

I think there's a little confusion and hopefully we can sort it out.

William Buchanan's pull request was on github.com/stan-dev/statastan's gh-pages branch. (gh-pages is the branch, not master) By creating the gh-pages branch on stan-dev/statastan and merging his branch into that branch allowed for serving a project page:
https://stan-dev.github.io/statastan

(this should redirect to https://mc-stan.org/statastan)

The updates to that particular branch hasn't really changed any of the http://mc-stan.org behavior. (You can access http://mc-stan.org/statastan by typing that directly, but it's not linked from anything on mc-stan.org.)

To update mc-stan.org, you want to checkout this repository, update it, and create a pull request against the master branch:
https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io

That's the repo for our website. For concreteness, interfaces/stata-stan.md
(see: https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/blob/master/interfaces/stata-stan.md)

gets rendered into this page:
http://mc-stan.org/interfaces/stata-stan.html

So... what are you trying to do? Did you want to provide the content on the stan-dev/statastan's gh-pages branch directly at http://mc-stan.org/interfaces/stata-stan.html? Alternatively, did you want a link to the project page from mc-stan.org/interfaces/stata-stan.html?

Daniel

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Robert Grant <rober...@live.com> wrote:

Some of you will have seen discussion on github with William Buchanan. It all seems to work OK from his wbuchanan.github.io so I'm happy to add it onto ours. But I haven't done gh-pages before so want to check I'm getting this right. There's a bunch of files that Stata will look for at a URL in order to install inside Stata. That should be at github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/statastan right??? And then is it on the master or the gh-pages branch? Any advice welcome.

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[Bob Carpenter]

StataStan launched their own web page on mc-stan.org:

https://mc-stan.org/statastan

It's not in the same style as the rest of our pages, so
I think it's going to be confusing to people as to where
they're at.

So I'd be in favor of either

* linking from the mc-stan.org page for installs, like
the other interfaces

OR

* reformatting the page so it looks like the rest of our pages

- Bob

[Robert Grant]

Hi, sorry for the delay in getting back to this topic. There is a command in Stata to install from a company-approved database of commands which is run by Kit Baum at Boston College, so to get StataStan, our users would most likely type:

ssc install windowsmonitor
ssc install stan

but there is also a command:

net install statastan, from("http://mc-stan.org/statastan")

which would fetch all the commands* it finds wrapped up by links in a .pkg file at the location. William Buchanan suggested this as a way of obtaining StataStan directly from GitHub and I thought it could provide a neat way to get the latest version, kind of like the stable release is through SSC and the unstable release is through github.io

Both of these work with the current arrangement! But the unstable one needs some work. Sorry about the sparkly blue comic sans. I had no idea it would look so awful! All of this github pages stuff is new for me, and the last week or two have been too hectic to get to grips with it. So if anyone wants to step in and tweak the contents of gh-pages (equivalently http://mc-stan.org/statastan), feel free. Thanks to those who sent me stuff to read on this topic. It's in my inbox.

* - this is a pain. Stata use the term 'program' for what R users would call a function (but in part that's because Stata is, insofar as it is a language, not functional). But I think that's ambiguous, so I prefer to call it a command because that's what the user sees. Several commands can form a package through 'net install', but not through 'ssc install'. Once inside Stata, there are no packages, only commands. Urgh.

[Robert Grant]

Given I haven't got round to this, and it's still lurking online looking bad, could someone delete it (I'm scared to do the wrong thing here and affect the website) and we'll consider coming back to it in future? It's not essential.

Robert

[Daniel Lee]

Hi Robert,

Can you help out and let me know what exactly you want deleted?

I don't want to read your mind here... I'd rather you just tell me and I can help out.

Daniel

[Bob Carpenter]

If you do a pull request, there's no danger of deleting anything.
And it's very hard to mess up the history on GitHub (just don't
rebase on the origin server, i.e., GitHub).

- Bob

[Robert Grant]

Thanks Daniel, it's this page at http://mc-stan.org/statastan/ which is a copy of wbuchanan's clone of statastan and now a bit out of date. This shouldn't be there at all (mc-stan.org/statastan) so in the first instance I would like to take it out. I could just delete the gh-pages branch from stan-dev/statastan. Will that cause any problems elsewhere? I just don't know how github pages works really! Then I can make a new stata.toc and statastan.pkg file and stash those on any page that gets rendered as http (not https). People can then access those from inside Stata without having to download files and put them in the appropriate local folders etc etc which some find too much. So my current thinking is:

1. remove the gh-pages branch from stan-dev/statastan

2. later, add an updated .toc and .pkg that Stata can read into stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io

does that sound right?

Robert

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[Bob Carpenter]

Yes, please remove the gh-pages branch from stan-dev/statastan
if it's out of date. Nothing else links to it.

I'm not sure how the serving works from GitHub pages for non-HTML.

- Bob

[Robert Grant]

Done.

[Daniel Lee]

Thanks and sorry for not getting to it sooner.


Daniel