[tex-live] how to Clean uninstall TL2011

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-10-17 at 11:46:27 +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 > 2012/10/16 George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com>:
 > > On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 4:40 AM, roy.nico <roy.nico at free.fr> wrote:
 > >
 > >> I had TL2011 and I installed TL2012. Can I simply remove
 > >> /usr/local/texlive/2011 ?
 > >
 > > Assuming you did not use symlinks for TL2011, yes.  If you did
 > > use symlinks, there is a possibility that some dangling links
 > > could remain.  There may also be $HOME/.texlive2011 trees in your
 > > users' home directories.
 > >
 > If the symlinks were created by TL2012, deletion of the TL2011 tree
 > is safe. If the symlinks were created by TL2011 and nut by TL2012,
 > after deletion TL will cease to work. In such a case it is
 > necessary to use tlmgr from TL2011 and remove the symlinks (or do
 > it manually). If you do not know whether you have symlinks, you can
 > try which tex
 > 
 > and
 > 
 > ls -l `which tex`
 > 
 > to see where to symlinks point.

I recommend not to create these symlinks at all.  Karl already
considered to remove this option from the installer.  The sole reason
it's still there is because it's quite difficult to describe how to
set PATH system-wide on the various Unix/Linux systems.

The preferred way is to add the TeX Live bin/<platform> directory to
PATH and I suppose that it's what most people already do.  On the
other hand, it's dead easy to install and use modern Linux systems
whithout prior knowledge.  It's quite likely then that some users are
unable to find out how to add something to PATH.  In such cases it's
still possible to ask the installer to create symlinks.  But it's the
last resort, not the preferred way.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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