[Developers] instructions for ADMB-RE

[Hans Julius Skaug]

Ian  and Charlotte,

Please do not feel afraid to post such issues to the user list. This is how
the documentation gets improved. On the particular question
from Charlotte there must be some error with the scripts. The command
for compiling RE models certainly is "admb -r simple" or "admb -r -s simple".

Hans

________________________________
From: developers-bounces at admb-project.org [developers-bounces at admb-project.org] On Behalf Of Ian Taylor [Ian.Taylor at noaa.gov]
Sent: 31 January 2011 19:56
To: developers at admb-project.org
Cc: 'Charlotte Boyd'
Subject: [Developers] instructions for ADMB-RE

Hi ADMB Developers,
After seeing Arni's email about making improvements to the ADMB manuals, I thought I'd add to the discussion the following comments from Charlotte Boyd regarding ADMB-RE.

I've never used ADMB-RE so I'm not really in a position to update the FAQ to accurately reflect the current level of integration with the rest of ADMB. Indeed, there are surely a variety of places where the FAQ could use updating as ADMB evolves that I will fail to notice. Therefore, this is really a plea to all of you to check over the page http://admb-project.org/documentation/faq from time to time and look for things that are out of date. I will happily make any suggested changes, or you can wade in and make the changes yourself.

-Ian

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        admb faqs
Date:   Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:17:24 -0800
From:   Charlotte Boyd <boydchar at u.washington.edu><mailto:boydchar at u.washington.edu>
To:     Ian.Taylor at noaa.gov<mailto:Ian.Taylor at noaa.gov>


Hi Ian

I hope all goes well in your new job? I’ve just installed ADMB on a new computer and tried to compile an ADMB-RE tpl for the first time. I spent all afternoon overcoming a very simple problem, and thought perhaps it might be worth mentioning on your (very useful) FAQs page – the latest ADMB and ADMB-RE documentation was not particularly helpful, perhaps because this is essentially a compiler issue.

Anyway ..

Your current FAQs mention that:

An extension of the language, ADMB-RE is available for modeling random effects.

It would perhaps be worth mentioning that the necessary scripts are incorporated into the installation packages on the downloads page (at least they are for mingw) – i.e. there is no need to download a separate script. Most of the current documentation seems to imply a separate download, which I think was the case in the past.

The latest ADMB-RE user guide gives the following guidance on how to compile a *.tpl with random effects:

To compile simple.tpl, we would, under both platforms, give the command:
$ admb -r simple
Here, $ is the command line prompt (which may be a di_erent symbol, or symbols, on your
computer), and -r is an option telling the program admb that your model contains random
e_ects.

At least on my set up, this simply crashes the command window. I finally got it to work by typing ‘makeadmre filename’, which I haven’t used before, even when using mingw. Perhaps it would be useful to mention in your FAQs for new users that different set ups require different commands to compile, and that trying a different command might solve compilation problems.

Hopefully this is helpful – if not, please feel free to ignore.

cheers

Charlotte

Charlotte Boyd
School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
University of Washington
1122 NE Boat St Rm 116
Seattle WA 98105