Re: TeXLive and dist-upgrades of Debian Stable

For my installations I tend to do something similar to what they do on Mac.

I have my texlives in /opt/texlive/<year>  and so in /opt/texlive/ I made a softlink called "current" that just points to the version I want to use

Then in my PATH settings I have

/opt/texlive/current/bin/x86_64-linux

and whan I want to change it I just move the softlink and there is no need to edit configuration files, log out/in etc. Very simple.

If I want to just run pdflatex from a specifug year I have this bash function in my .bash_aliases

function old_pdflatex () { PATH=/opt/texlive/$1/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH  pdflatex $2 ;}

usage

old_pdflatex 2023 foo.tex

one can write something similar to be able to run any command from another years TL, without having to "switch" to it. Very handy if someone says "but it works in TL23", then we can easily check.



Lars Madsen
Programmør

Institut for Matematik
Aarhus Universitet

person.au.dk/daleif@math<https://person.au.dk/daleif@math>

________________________________
From: tex-live <[email protected]> on behalf of Karl Berry <[email protected]>
Sent: 04 September 2025 22:20
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: TeXLive and dist-upgrades of Debian Stable

Hi again Govinda,

    The following is the result of echo $PATH :
    /usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/x86_64-linux

Ok, so that explains why when you run "tex", you get the TL'25 TeX.
So what's the problem again :)?

    1. How to update TL 2025.

tlmgr update --all

    2. had queried about ~/texmf (got the answer.)

Indeed, not affected.

    3. How to switch between my old TeXLive and this one.

As several people have said: change your PATH. If
/usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/x86_64-linux is before /usr/bin,
you'll get the TL25 you just installed. If /usr/bin is earlier,
you'll get Debian TeX.

If you have a terminal window or shell in which you get the Debian TeX
from "tex", its PATH surely has /usr/bin first. --best, karl.