[racket] Possible to install both plt-scheme from repo and racket from racket-lang.org?

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Sun Aug 15 06:22:01 EDT 2010

On Aug 13, Byron Gibson wrote:
> Thanks Horace, your first guess was correct, by 'repo' I mean my
> linux distro (Ubuntu) software repository.

To get the latest version, the easiest option is to get our .sh
installer and run it (pass it as an argument to sh, or run it
directly).  The first question it asks is whether you want a
unix-style installation -- the default is to not do this, which means
that you get the whole racket installation in a single directory that
you can put anywhere you want in your system, including in your home
directory.  This makes it very convenient to use even if you're using
some lab machine where you don't have root access.

(And, of course, if you choose the unix-style installation with the
default directories, then the files will overwrite the files from the
ubuntu package.  The installer should generally be careful about such
things and alert you that the directory exists.)


> I prefer to use the distro repository to install software when
> possible, since that makes it easier to manage and update (at least
> for a relative Linux newbie),

There's not much to "managing" a racket installation in a single
directory -- you can move the directory anywhere you want, and you can
upgrade it by deleting the whole thing and installing a newer version
in the same way.  To make it possible to run executables without
specifying long paths, you can drop symlinks into some directory that
is in your path.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


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