Upgrade Stata 15 to Stata 17 - compatibility issues

[Erik Buunk]

Hi,

In our organization, we are upgrading from Stata 15 to Stata 17. We ran into incompatibility issues. Adding 'version 15' to the do file did not solve the problem. (The example right now is with the `dprobit` function)

Is there an overview of the changes, incompatibilities, and solutions when upgrading Stata or should Stata with the `version 15` directive be backward compatible? Where can I address issues with backward compatibility?

I am not big Stata user myself, but I am organizing the upgrade.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Erik

[Maarten Buis]

It is hard to diagnose the problem, other then that in Stata 15 dprobit was already 8 years superseded by margins. I ran the example in the help file and that still works.

[Erik Buunk]

Thank you Maarten,
I will send this to the researcher who mentioned the issue. I have not included that the details for this item yet, because, I was looking for general information and touch points for these types of issues.

[William Lisowski]

In Stata 17, running

help whatsnewtoc

will provide links to Stata's release notes on changes made in its releases and in its updates after the initial release, which addresses the question you asked.

Any incompatibility in the dprobit command is an unfortunately poor example. The output of help dprobit begins with the caveat

    dprobit continues to work but, as of Stata 11, is no longer an official part of Stata.  This is
    the original help file, which we will no longer update, so some links may no longer work.

    See margins for a recommended alternative to dprobit.

So the problem your organization is facing with dprobit is continued reliance on a command for over a decade after it was superseded by another command. To ease the transition Stata did not remove dprobit at that time, but at this point you perhaps need to take the action recommended a decade ago.

With regard to version control, the output of help version tells us that its use

    ... ensures that your do-file or program will continue to run in all future
    versions of Stata, even if that future version has changes in the syntax of some of the
    commands or programming constructs that you use in your do-file or program.

That is, it can revert changes in the syntax used by a command. It will not however, ensure that the results are identical to those from running the command on the earlier version of Stata. If an error in the command logic has been corrected, that correction will remain even under version control. And I note that despite not being part of official Stata, the version of dprobit.ado in Stata 17 was updated most recently on 19Jan2021, which is after the final update to Stata 15.

Perhaps Stata Technical Services can help you understand your problem with dprobit, although in fact the appropriate response to the problem is to move on from using dprobit.

[Erik Buunk]

Thank you for your detailed reply, this is very helpful.

It seems that dprobit should be updated to margins, to make sure everything keeps working.