Program to copy packages to local folder

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

A recent thread on this forum inspired me to ask an opposite question of sorts. In environments where user-contributed packages are used and code is required to be archived, are there packages that copy packages as they currently exist to an arbitrary local folder?

[daniel klein]

I know of two packages in this area: dependencies and zippkg (both from SSC). I am not sure these do exactly what you want.


Edit:

I think the most challenging part here is to identify the (most recent) elements of any package that you want to copy. This can get pretty tricky when there are multiple versions of the same package/command installed on a machine or when multiple versions of stata.trk files exist on a machine. In general, downloading the respective files (which is the approach that zippkg takes) seems to be easier.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Thank you, Daniel. This is helpful to see there are some packages aimed at this goal. I think for my own purposes, a simple archive made by -zippkg- for example would be sufficient.