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What is the best way to upgrade my MacTeX from version 2022 to 2023? Do I have to uninstall and delete everything from 2022 and then reinstall 2023? On the website the instructions are not that specific for me. Anyway, I don't want to have 2022 in parallel on the Mac, but upgrade to 2023. Can you help me please?

JamesT
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herry.23
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1 Answers1

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TeXLive doesn't provide an upgrade path; it's always best to install the current year from scratch. For the Mac that simply means downloading the latest MacTeX installer and installing it.

There's no need to delete the previous year's installation before installing the new one, since multiple years can coexist peacefully on your computer. Depending on how much disk space you you can spare, keeping older years around can sometimes be helpful if you have older projects that might need recompilation.

Once you've installed the newest version you can delete older years by following the directions here:

Alan Munn
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  • Thank you! So that means I really ONLY need to delete /usr/local/texlive/2022 and ~/Library/texlive/2022 AFTER I have installed MacTeX 2023? Seems so few to me, if I'm honest. Are the changes then also accepted and changed by all programs or do you have to change something manually like "PATH" or similar? Or does TeXShop recognize it automatically? And all other things like the "TeX Distribution Data Structure" and "Ghostscript" are also updated alone? – herry.23 Jun 19 '23 at 10:38
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    @herry.23 Yes, that's all you need to delete, and everything in the new distribution will just work. No need to do anything else. – Alan Munn Jun 19 '23 at 12:20
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    Thank you! I still have one question: If I do NOT delete the version 2022, is the installation of 2023 also automatically linked as default? Because then, deleting the version 2022 is actually only good if I want to save disk space or? Because I thought that there may be problems with the dependencies. – herry.23 Jun 19 '23 at 12:44
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    Yes, when you install a new version everything will run using that version and there will be no interference with previous versions. You can use TeXLive Utility to switch to an older distribution if you need to use it, but by default you will be using the new one and everything will just work. It's a good idea to use TeXLive Utility to update the distribution after you've installed it. – Alan Munn Jun 19 '23 at 13:04