Annual upgrade

[Markus Kohm]

Am Mittwoch, 27. März 2024, 00:07:00 CET schrieb Patrick Bideault via tex-
live:
> It took me five hours to get a running TeX Live again

To avoid this, you should not do an upgrade but a fresh installation. You can 
use the existing previous installation as long as you change the PATH to the 
new installation. And you can even switch back to every still installed 
version by changing back PATH. Doing so you never would have a TeX Live 
downtime.

BTW: I only deinstall old versions of TeX Live, when I'm sure, I do not need 
them any longer. Deinstallation is easy: Remove /usr/local/texlive/YYYY.

BTW: If you use apt to upgrade to a new ubuntu release not only to update 
packages inside the same ubuntu release, this also can fail extremely. Last 
year it resulted in a no longer booting notebook, here. After some hours 
trying to reactivate it, I gave up. I've then done a fresh installation and 
recovered a backup of /home. So don't think, that with apt no shit happens.

But having backups mostly helps. If you do an annual fresh TeX Live 
installation you automatically have a kind of backup (but usually on the same 
drive so not a real backup).

Markus