uninstalling an old version

[James Diamond]

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

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> 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