uninstalling an old version

[Bob Tennent]

 >|    Might tlmgr remove --all or the above have removed the
 >|    symlinks in /usr/local/bin?
 >|
 >|It is supposed to, yes.

Hmm. So if one has installed TL-2020 (even the pretest) and
then uninstalls TL-2019, the symlinks to the 2020 bins are
removed? That doesn't seem right. And if, as I suspect, the
PATH variable by mistake pointed to the now non-existent
2019/bin/x86_64-linux, no wonder it seemed my system was
broken. Surely uninstalling a version of TL should *not*
remove symlinks to the binaries of a more recent version.

 >|    When I re-installed, install-tl
 >|    pointed out to me that in that xterm,
 >|    TEXMFVAR=~/.texlive2019/texmf-var;
 >|
 >|That is puzzling, since I doubt you explicitly set it as
 >|an envvar.

I do and have done for years. How else to control which
~/.texliveXXXX is in effect? Granted it was a mistake on
my part to do the uninstalling in a shell that hadn't had
the envvars updated since before the installation of the
pretest.

Bob