[Gretl-users] Possible redundancy of some function packages?

Hi everybody, I'm wondering whether some of the function packages are still needed, because sometimes it looks as if the same functionality is already built into gretl. Here's a quick list in random order: 1) "clustered_ols" by Claudia Pigini. In what way is this different from the built-in "ols ... --cluster=xyz"? 2) "cnumber" by Monsueto, S.E -- Here I don't think it's redundant but I'm not getting the same results as with other code that should (?) be equivalent. Consider this example and please explain why the results are different: <hansl> include cnumber.gfn open greene12_1.gdt matrix X = {age, income, expend} cnumber (X) l = eigensym(X'X, null) # lines taken from Allin's email CN = maxc(l)/minc(l) # printf "CN = %g, (square root = %g)\n", CN, sqrt(CN) </hansl> 3) "fgls" by Yi-Nung Yang: the help just says feasible GLS which is very vague and generic; in what way is this different from gretl's "hsk" or "wls" commands? If it is different, I would suggest to make the help text more informative. 4) "GHegy" by Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza and "HEGY_test" by Jack Lucchetti. Could you guys perhaps consolidate these? 5) "HoltWinters" by Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza. This sounds a lot like it's also done by the "fcModels" package by Yi-Nung Yang. Is this true? 6) "JB" by Yi-Nung Yang. This does a Jarque-Bera test and even the help text mentions that it is built into gretl (as "normtest ... --jbera"). So it's not obvious to me what the purpose of the package is. 7) "MWU" and "mwu" by Yi-Nung Yang. AFAICS the only difference is whether you pass the arguments as series or as vectors (matrices). This may be a matter of taste, but personally I would suggest that you choose which is the interface of your function, i.e. series or matrices, and then the user/caller will have to follow that rule, and the other package with the other interface would be gone. And with respect to "mwu_dummy", this is even more of a personal taste thing, but perhaps you could consolidate all this into one function, for example by introducing a third function parameter with a default value: "function void mwu(series x, series y, int dummy[0])" So to do what "mwu_dummy()" does now you would pass your 'group' variable as y, and call the function with dummy=1. Thanks, sven