"invalid freeparm argument" in Stata 15 - Mata related?

[William Lisowski]

Since the release of Stata 15 we have seen three posts reporting the following error message.

invalid freeparm argument;
only "on" or "off" is allowed

The first two occurred when using multiple imputation, and had no resolution that I could find.

https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-mice-stata-15
https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...61#post1407261

Today's report is with the SJ program femlogit, which includes a Mata library apparently doing the bulk of the work. The topic was (probably mistakenly) posted in the Mata Forum, which I originally thought might be relevant to the problem so did not suggest relocating it to the General Forum.

https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...h-fixed-effect

I find in help whatsnew14to15 much about changes to free parameters, both in Stata and in Mata, including a Mata function

moptimize_init_eq_freeparm(M, i, {"on"|"off"})

which certainly suggests something which if misused would generate the error message shown.

If you have anything to add to this, either in this topic or at the topic for today's question it will certainly be appreciated. I'm in well over my head.

[Miguel Dorta (StataCorp)]

The error message "invalid freeparm argument" is returned when an update for Stata 15 was not properly completed. For example, this can happen due to firewall or antivirus restrictions, Internet connection issues, or others. We recommend forcing and update by typing:

update all, force

If the problem persists, please send a reproducible example to [email protected], along with any error messages that might be returned during the updating process.

[David Fisher]

Hi Miguel Dorta (StataCorp) et al,

I've encountered the same error simply running logit (v15.1 IC). update all, force and rebooting did not work, so I took my laptop to our IS team, who uninstalled and re-installed the entire application, again without success: see the attached screenshot image.

It may be of interest to note that a colleague of mine running v15.1 MP does not have this issue. Our department's multiple-user licensed version of Stata also works fine, albeit under v15.0 IC rather than 15.1.

Thanks,

David.

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

Please download Stata Installation Qualification Tool at https://www.stata.com/support/instal...qualification/ and run it, report back its findings.

[David Fisher]

Hi Hua Peng (StataCorp) ,

Thanks for the IQT, that's very helpful. It showed me that the problem was base ado files stored in more than one location in the adopath. The update to 15.1 seemed to not be applied uniformly in all locations, so that I think I ended up with something that was fully neither 15.0 nor 15.1. Simplifying my adopath and forcing the update again seems to have worked.

Many thanks,

David.