[tex-live] Upgrade from texlive 2016

[Manfred Lotz]

Hi Reinhard,

On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 01:55:43 +0200
Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> On 2017-07-16 at 20:52:36 +0300, Nikos Platis wrote:
> 
>  > OK, there are two things mixed up here, incorrectly (by Zdenek and
>  > then Manfred).
>  > 
>  > (a) The update command (tlmgr update ...) has updated TL 2016 to
>  > 2017 without any warning, in the same directory.
>  > (b) The procedure described
>  > in https://www.tug.org/texlive/upgrade.html does instruct to
>  > duplicate the installation directory.
>  > 
>  > It seems that all this (esp. (a)) will soon be corrected by Norbert
>  > (btw, if I recall correctly, in previous years you simply could not
>  > upgrade directly).  
> 
> Upgrading from a previous release was possible in the past.  But take
> the documentation you mentioned above seriously.  It clearly states
> that the recommended way is to install TeX Live from scratch and that
> you are on your own if you follow the instructions.
> 
> The very first sentence, printed with bold letters, states:
> 
>  | By default, please get the new TL by doing a new installation
>  | instead of proceeding here.
> 
> It's a matter of fact that upgrading from a previous release is faster
> than installing from scratch.  But upgrading is quite risky and the
> gain is negligible if you take into account that new versions of TeX
> Live are released only once per year.
> 
> In short, before you consider to upgrade your system, read
> 
>   https://www.tug.org/texlive/upgrade.html
> 
> carefully.  I've never seen a comparable file which comes with so many
> warnings.  Take them seriously.
> 
> Coming back to your statements:
> 
>  > (a) The update command (tlmgr update ...) has updated TL 2016 to
>  > 2017 without any warning, in the same directory.  
> 
> When I upgraded from TeX Live 2016 to tlpretest I've got a warning.
> 
>  > (b) The procedure described in  
> 
>  >        https://www.tug.org/texlive/upgrade.html  
> 
>  > does instruct to duplicate the installation directory.  
> 
> I assume that Manfred followed this advice.  Hopefully!  Then both
> directories, texlive/2016 and texlive/2017, contain identical copies
> of TeX Live 2016.
> 

To be honest, I haven't read that as I didn't expect 2016 to be lifted
to 2017.

> Given that Manfred forgot to adjust PATH to point to
> texlive/2017/bin/<platform>, then tlmgr upgraded files in texlive/2016
> to TeX Live 2017.
> 

No, usually (as a command line geek) I'm pretty much aware of PATH and
other environment variables.  :-)

> This looks disastrous at a first glance.  But nothing is lost.
> 
>    texlive/2016 now contains TeX Live 2017
> 
> but
> 
>    texlive/2017 still contains a copy of TeX Live 2016.
> 
> All one has to do is to remame directories and to adjust PATH.
> 
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
> 

Let me tell what I did.  :-)

On a second non-private laptop I installed texlive 2017 and adjusted
the PATH, and all was fine.

Then I thought: texlive 2016 is very old as I hadn't done any update
for an awful lot of time. So, I should at least get the newest stuff of
texlive 2016. 

I adjusted the PATH back to 2016 and did: tlmgr update --all

Of course I got told to do a --self which i did.  Then I restarted the
'tlmgr update --all', went to the kitchenn for a coffee and when
being back I got a list of 880 packages to update. 

On the one hand I was wondering about the sheer amount of packages
to update on the other hand I new that I hadn't done an update "for
ages" and I also know on a daily basis how busy authors do update their
packages. So I did the mass update, and was happy.

Some time later, Harald König told me that it happened to him, after an
upgrade in texlive 2016 ,that now his /usr/local/texlive/2016 contains
texlive 2017.

Being back at home I checked my updated 2016 tree, and discovered the
same. Actually, in my case it wasn't important if I have still the 2016
lying around. So, instead to recover from backup I deleted the 2016
(containing 2017) tree.


-- 
Best, Manfred