Re: [Gretl-devel] time for 1.9.8?

One general question: do we want to make a big deal of gretl 2.0, or I think a Linus is fine. The evolution of gretl is steady and a lot has changed from say 1.7 to 1.9.7 3) A major backward-incompatible clean-up of hansl I agree with Alin completely here. The main estimators "missing" are the various simulated mle and such. gretl is already competent in the main categories, wls, iv, gmm, mle, nls. This is not a big deal for me, but as models get fancier, these techniques will be used more. Whether this is better done as an addon or in C I can't say. is now, in a few minutes you end up with a dozen open windows to sort through and this is clunky. Is there a way to introduce tabs into the script editor and perhaps the output windows? So, for instance, the script editor contains tabs for each open script. Ditto for the model output windows. I realize that the session concept is a good way to organize the models, but tabs would be good as well. Being able to dock the main window, the console, and tabbed output window would be very nice. It is ok as is. As conflicts arise, they do get taken care of. This should be the first priority. The documentation is excellent in what it covers, but it suffers three problems. 1. It is not complete. 2. It is hard to use because it is not sufficiently cross-referenced. Half the stuff I'm looking for is covered in the User Guide the other half in the Command Reference and they don't communicate with each other. There are also the example scripts, many of which are undocumented, that should be cross-referenced in both places. 3. It is not easy for potential contributors to add tthings. It might be useful to consider some sort of structure for writing and reviewing new documentation. This is not a trivial pursuit by any means. Consistency of terms and notation across such a large swath of econometric practice not a easy thing to accomplish. Open source documentation can be horrible (witness R). Gretl, for what it has, is good. We're just not taking much advantage of the openness ... which as R demonstrates, is not without problems. Cross-referencing and openness, though not incompatible, are certainly not going to be easy to do without some commitment. Should the User Guide be modularlized in order to make it easier to add entries to the Econometric Methods section? I'd like to see a way to add documented examples that can be accessed from links with the command and the user reference. We've already got some nice examples in the program itself, but they need some words to go with the hansl code, IMO. As an example, if I open the command reference and click on leverage, I'm taken to some stuff that comes from the Command Reference document. At the bottom, there should be links to the relevant entries in the User Guide and to the leverage.inp script. Also, the leverage script example should be discussed in the User Guide. This is bound to make translations harder. The only other canned software I'm using these days is Stata (and R, only if I absolutely must). So, I'm not familiar with how Eviews, Limdep, SAS, or other econometric software is documented. The documents in Stata are very good. The examples help a lot. Stata's findit command is magical. Cheers All, Lee PS I suppose it's about time for me to start working on the next conference. Ignacio sent me a to do list a couple of months ago, and despite his kind urging and support, I've been in complete denial about my impending role. I hope to meet with our extension director next week to get the ball rolling. FWIW, we hosted a very large (well 200+ attendees) marketing conference last year and managed to do it in Stillwater. Here's the PR department's take on it: http://spears.okstate.edu/news/2011/06/28/osu-hosts-prestigious-amasheth-... . We sent vans to OKC or Tulsa to retrieve folks from the airport. A lot will depend on finances -- hosting here may cost less and I might be more likely to get the Dean to cough up some support. I'll know more by the end of the month. Any thoughts? -- Lee Adkins Professor of Economics lee.adkins(a)okstate.edu learneconometrics.com