uninstalling an old version

[Lars Madsen]

Also remember that just adding it to .bashrc often is not enough. I start everything from the CLI, so I have no issues with this. But a user who start their editor using a menu etc will never have had their PATH changed as starting the editor never involved a bash shell.

So I always advise to add it to .profile as well as it is executed as part of the login and this the PATH change is seen by the editor started from a menu.

(each year we see a lot of users who have installed TL correctly and added the change to barshrc becaose someone told them to, and they complain that their editor cannot find TL, or finds a sys installed older TL)

​BTW I do the same 'current' symlink trick. easy switch between versions, no cleanup.



/Lars Madsen
Institut for Matematik / Department of Mathematics
Aarhus Universitet / Aarhus University
Mere info: http://au.dk/daleif@math<http://au.dk/daleif@imf> / More information: http://au.dk/en/daleif@math<http://au.dk/en/daleif@imf>

________________________________
From: tex-live <tex-live-bounces+daleif=imf.au.dk at tug.org> on behalf of James Diamond via tex-live <tex-live at tug.org>
Sent: 15 March 2020 16:07
To: tex-live at tug.org <tex-live at tug.org>
Subject: Re: Re: Re: uninstalling an old version

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 04:34 (+0100), Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> CAUTION: This email comes from outside Acadia. Verify the sender and use caution with any requests, links or attachments.

> On 2020-03-14 at 22:30:40 -0400, Bob Tennent wrote:

>> That's not my scenario. I asked the 2019 tlmgr to uninstall
>> TL-2019. I didn't ask it to remove existing symlinks to
>> TL-2020, much less create new ones.

> There can only be ***one*** set of symlinks in /usr/local/bin.  They
> either point to TL2019 ***or*** to TL2020.  If you remove them, none
> of the distributions is accessible.  This is expected behavior.

> As I said before, I vote for removing the "create symlinks" option
> from the installer because it obviously creates more problems than it
> solves.  When I asked Karl to keep this option I had unexperienced
> users in mind but now I see that even experienced users run into
> trouble.  I recognize now that my suggestion was wrong.

> Simply follow the instructions the installer prints to screen and
> avoid symlinks.  Evereything works as expected then.  You can have as
> many TeX Live distributions as you want and each one is accessible if
> you set PATH accordingly.

Just to throw a little gas on the fire, ...

I install TL in /usr/local/texlive/YYYY
And I have one symlink
        /usr/local/texlive/current
which points to a sub-directory of /usr/local/texlive (today it is 2019).
When I install TL2020 into /usr/local/texlive/2020 I will
handraulically change just this one symlink to point to 2020.  Easy peasy.

My PATH has /usr/local/texlive/current/bin/x86_64-linux and I never
need to change that.

(In another message it was suggested to collect some paths and add
them to .bashrc.  Since I'm here anyway I'll mention that not all
Linux users use bash.)

Cheers.

                                Jim

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