I’ve noticed that every time I install a new version of Julia it’s quite the headache. I went from 1.1 to 1.2 most recently and it was a little easier to figure out but still not a straightforward process. Why is it not possible to do something like:
] update julia
and just have the package manager update the source binaries to the latest stable release?
My process was (for macOS):
download Julia 1.2 dmg
install the new and delete the old .app
remove the old sym link rm /usr/local/bin/julia
create sym link for the new sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-1.2.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia
…well, I don’t think it is a Windows vs Mac question here. If you’re just happy to double click on an icon to run the latest version of Julia, then the process is the same in Windows as in Mac. If you want to run it from the command line, having the “julia” command always pointing to the latest version, then you’ll have to symlink or alias in Windows as well, I’m afraid.
Maybe you have already homebrew on your Mac. On a system with homebrew and without Julia you just call brew cask install julia once to install Julia. After that a simple brew update followed by brew cask upgrade suffices to get new Julia versions (a new version may not be available the same day it is published by the Julia team; but usually the homebrew repository lags at most a few days behind).
If you do not know homebrew, it’s a package manager for MacOS (a bit like apt for Debian/Ubuntu or chocolately for Windows). The homepage is https://brew.sh/
Another option may be JILL (I just read about it in another thread).
@snobis I have homebrew and use it for some packages. I had trouble with getting Julia to work with atom/Juno (text editor and ide) using homebrew. So I installed using official download. Everything works quite well except when I go to switch to a newer version. And to @mcarpe yes I usually want the command line tool integrated into my zsh instead of the shell provided by julialang.
In windows it is fairly easy to uninstall (with a double click on uninstall ) and then install the new version in the same location (preferably a folder name without a version)
Like this all path/environment variables keep working.
On my linux distro, the newest version of Julia gets pulled down as part of normal package updating with no extra action needed on my part*. Just saying, if you’re optimizing your platform by the ease of upgrading Julia, there’s a pretty clear winner…
* Okay, fine. I maintain the Julia package for my distro, so technically I have to take a little more action, but that’s kinda beside the point here.
Obligatory reminder that running things in a shell directly downloaded with curl/wget is a very bad idea. All executables should be manually inspected before being run unless you have verified a trusted cryptographic signature on the binary.
) and then install the new version in the same location (preferably a folder name without a version)