uninstalling an old version

[Zdenek Wagner]

Symlinks are good if you are pretty sure that you always have just one
TeX distribution and before upgrading it you delete it completely.
Unfortunatelly, many Linux distributions contain theri own TeX
distributions and the installation is triggered by installing SGML or
XML tools or even by R. These distributions (if not installed
intentionally but due to dependencies) are usually incomplete and if
you do not check the validity of symlinks every day and do not handle
the automatically installed dependencies, you ask for weird erros
which can sometimes only be detected by running strace. I saw such
problems more than 100 times. This is why I stopped using symlinks in
TL 16 years ago. It happened even to me that after installing a
package not related to TeX at all suddenly TeX ceased to work with
complex documents and I was only able to compile very simple files.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

so 27. 2. 2021 v 0:27 odesílatel Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> napsal:
>
> Hi Denis,
>
>     IMO, symlinks are the simpler method to install TL on Unix.
>
> I remember that that's your opinion, but I do not share it :).  Aside
> from the maintainability problems you mention, to me the default
> "containment" of TL within its own directories is a fundamentally
> desirable feature that I would not want to suggest changing. --best, karl.