Transitioning from Ubuntu PPA to official binaries

New to Julia
6

Thanks for dropping by! I came across Jill while I was studying how to transition to the official binaries, but I didn’t try it, for two reasons.

  1. I wasn’t sure how it might interact with the PPA version of Julia. How would it deal with the fact that I already had a julia executable in my system path? Would it respect the directory structure of ~/.julia set up by the old package manager?

  2. I couldn’t easily figure out what it was doing. If the installation failed—and maybe even broke my existing PPA installation—I would have to trace through 150 lines of bash script (with 10 lines of explanatory comments) to figure out what I’d just done. I know Jill isn’t particularly complicated, but it has enough moving parts that I’d find them hard to keep track of, and I’m not fluent in bash.

Now that I know how easy it is to install the official binaries by hand (if I don’t need to have Julia in my system path, it’s literally just downloading a single folder and putting it somehwere!), I’m afraid I’m not eager to try Jill. When I’m working outside the Ubuntu package management system, I like to keep track of what I’m doing as well as I can, and in this case the easiest way to do that is by hand.