I don't use MiKTeX or any other package managers. I usually install new styles/libraries by adding the .sty file to the same directory as the .tex file and compile using pdflatex.
I figured out I have pgf version 2.0 and want to upgrade to version 2.10. I already tried doing texhash, but that didn't seem to change anything.
Can someone help me out? I don't wish to install any MiKTex-like software.
The solution to replace the /usr/share/texmf folder contents will certainly work -- but only so long until the package manager updates you TeX distribution.
The preferred way to install a local copy of a huge package like pgf 2.10 would be to install it either into your local texmf tree (which should have a higher priority when TeX actually searches for files) or you could also set the TEXINPUTS variable accordingly. The first approach is certainly the standard approach, but it may require to re-structure the directory representation of pgf 2.10 (pgf2.10/generic/pgf --> ~/texmf/tex/generic/pgf, pgf2.10/latex/pgf --> ~/texmf/tex/latex/pgf should already be enough for a LaTeX distribution).
The second approach would mean to unzip pgf 2.10 anywhere on your hard drive (for example the directory into which you would have copied .sty files for simple packages) and set TEXINPUTS=<my dir to pgf 2.10//: before compiling with this particular version. Note that // means "search in this directory and all its sub-directories" and the trailing : means "now continue searching in the default search paths" (don't forget this trailing :!). There are reasons why this might be a bad idea (slower due to lacking search index, also searches in pgf/doc/**, to say two obvious choices), but I like it because setting an environment variable is so light-weight and usually works much better than the other alternatives.
Note that even if you would use MikTeX, you could still install pgf in any directory of your choice (providing you apply the TDS restructuring as indicated above): you would then simply tell MikTeX "ah, and by the way: use my custom directory with higher priority than the system's default". But since you do not appear to use MikTeX, I won't go into the details.
The solution was to manually delete all files referring to the old version of pgf in the /usr/share/texmf folder. Then I manually copied all the files under the /tex directory in pgf_2.10.tds into the corresponding /usr/share/texmf folder. Then I ran texhash multiple times.
In the end, the library that I wanted to add worked, and compilation worked, and the result looks good.
Thanks.
