pandoc not taking the pdflatex binary from the PATH (within RStudio)

[JJ]

My Ubuntu has an obsolete version of TeXLive installed; I have installed the new one, and set all possible paths, including RSTUDIO_PDFLATEX. pandoc seems to be still using /usr/bin/pdflatex and I can't seem to find a way to tell RStudio to tell pandoc to use another one. I've tried setting latex_engine, but that seems to work only for the general name of the binary, not the path.
I can symlink the new binary from the old, but I'm kind of wary of doing that. Uninstalling the old version might also break some builds I have. Is there any way to solve this?

[jgm]

Please address this question to rstudio developers, as it concerns rstudio-specific things.

On the pandoc command line, you certainly can specify a full path with --pdf-engine.

Pandoc itself won't pay any attention to RSTUDIO_PDFLATEX, but putting your new LaTeX in your PATH (ahead of he old one) should make a difference.