How to upgrade Julia to a new release?

Question 1 - upgrade

I'm using v"0.3.8" on Windows. I found from

http://julialang.org/downloads/

Current Release (v0.3.9)

I know I could download the prebuild version and install again. Is there a way to upgrade (from current installed version) to the new version?

There's Pkg.update(), it runs for a long time without any output - it doesn't work in this way.

From the documentation:

update() Update package the metadata repo – kept in Pkg.dir("METADATA") – then update any fixed packages that can safely be pulled from their origin; then call Pkg.resolve() to determine a new optimal set of packages versions.

So it is not the right tool to upgrade the language itself.

Question 2 - Release Note

Is there such a thing as ReleaseNote or ChangeList? Or any hightlight on major change?

(I understand that the language hasn't reached v1.0. If there is a place to find major change/improvement, that's good. If not, that's fine.)

How to upgrade Julia:

Windows & MacOS & Linux

The most trivial way of upgrading Julia is to go to the download page and manually install corresponding binaries. (UPDATE: if you're on old Julia, e.g. v0.6)If you're going to upgrade Julia to a new minor version(e.g. v0.5=>v0.6), you could easily reinstall your old packages by the following steps(Julia-v1.0 shipped with the new package manager, so there is no such hassle):

julia> using Pkg # Pkg.init() if needed
copy REQUIRE file from package directory of the old version to the new one (in this example from .julia/v0.5 to .julia/v0.6) overwriting the existing file
julia> Pkg.resolve() # or Pkg.update()

MacOS

If you're using Homebrew and homebrew-julia, please follow the instructions here.

Linux

Use abelsiqueira's installer jill.

To OP's Question

1.Pkg.update() is used for updating Julia's packages, not Julia itself, so downloading the prebuild version and reinstalling seems to be the only way to upgrade Julia for now. Or you could build Julia from source following the instructions here.

2.The release notes are listed here:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/HISTORY.md
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/NEWS.md

I just wanna share my experience when updating julia from 0.3.11 to 0.4.0.

If you're using Ubuntu you can use:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade julia

It will bring the previous version be upgraded to the new version. But, the installed packages on the previous version won't be pulled up to the new version.

If you're using IJulia, when you start your "jupyter notebook", your jupyter kernel won't detect the new version of julia, but still detects the previous one. Also, the previous one be a dead kernel. You've to install IJulia manually from

Pkg.add("IJulia")

That's all.

2022 version

Questoin 1

Just wanted to share what I tried to update Julia on my windows and it worked just fine.

I added UpdateJulia package and using that (using UpdateJulia) I updated the Julia version on my PC by update_julia():

Open Julia Package manager and type in the following commands one by one,

]add UpdateJulia
using UpdateJulia
update_julia()

Remember: simply typing ] will bring you to pkg mode in REPL, and by delete (mac) or backspace (windows) you get out of it.

do the following

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade julia

then open the julia terminal and do

Pkg.update()
Pkg.build("IJulia")

You can also check out this link for future reference

Just to clarify for Windows User:

You have to reinstall the new version of Julia (in my case 0.6.2->0.6.3) But within the same "generation" (in my case: v0.6), the packages don't have to be reinstalled.

See also the corresponding discussion on discourse for a more detailed explanation.