It should be possible to install the official Julia binaries without interfering at all with your PPA-provided instlalation and without introducing any clutter. My process on linux is the following:
- I download the official binaries from Download Julia and store them in a folder (I happen to use
~/apps, but you can put them anywhere you want). I keep each minor Julia version in a separate folder. - I then create a symlink in
/usr/local/bin/with the appropriate julia version. For example, I might do:
sudo ln -s /home/rdeits/apps/julia-1.2.0/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia-1.2
Having versioned symlinks means it’s easy to run different Julia versions, (e.g. running julia-1.2 or julia-0.7 as needed).
- I then create one more symlink inside
/usr/local/bin:
sudo ln -s julia-1.2 /usr/local/bin/julia
This means that when I run julia I get julia-1.2. I can then switch my “default” julia version just by changing that symlink.
And that’s it. Julia never needs to install anything system-wide, and all of the packages will live under separate folders inside ~/.julia, with separate folders for each minor version of Julia. None of the files installed by the PPA version of Julia will be necessary if you use the official binaries.
You also don’t need to do anything special to transition to the new package manager – it should just work and should not overwrite any of your packages from older Julia releases.