Do really multiple versions of Julia need multiple JULIA_DEPOT_PATH?

General Usage
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Hello, on SO there is a conversation about multiple versions of Julia and the need to have a separate JULIA_DEPOT_PATH environmental variable for each of them.

The fact is that I have been using Julia for several years now on Linux by just symlinking the julia executable e.g. ~/bin/julia1.4 -> ~/lib/julia-1.4.2/bin/julia, ~/bin/julia1.6 -> ~/lib/julia-1.6.3/bin/julia, ~/bin/julia -> ~/bin/julia1.6 and I have used multiple versions of Julia sometimes also at the same time on different terminal windows without any problem.
So, is it really that I has been so “lucky” all this time or multiple Julia versions can coexist on a system without changing the environmental variables ? Maybe is it only for Linux ? Maybe there would be troubles for Conda (I use the python system installation) ?

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Several years of several Julia Version on Windows and I never had to mess around with any of the Julia environment variables. I would say, “no”, if no special reason, let JULIA_DEPOT_PATH alone. I don’t think, there is a difference between Windows and Linux.

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3

No, there is no need for that.

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