[texhax] Archiving Documents

[Philipp Stephani]

2013/4/26 Neal H. Walfield <neal at walfield.org>

> Hi,
>
> At some point (soon), I'm going to be done with my thesis.  I'd like
> to archive the document along with all its TeX dependencies (that is,
> everything except for latex itself).  My motivation is that I want to
> be able to rebuild my thesis in a few years.  My caution is based on
> my experiences working with various LaTeX packages.  When I started, I
> was using Debian Squeeze.  After upgrading to Wheezy, I learned that
> the new version of siunitx provides a new, incompatible API.  I needed
> to do \usepackage[version-1-compatibility]{siunitx} to get my document
> to compile.  Sure, it's easy, but I had figure that out.  Who knows
> what will happen in 10 years...
>
> What I imagine is some program that looks at my TeX log files and
> copies all of the system-wide files into a local texmf tree.  Does
> something like this already exist?
>

Put the operating system you use for compiling the document in a virtual
machine, and keep the virtual disk image around. Assuming there still exist
programs in ten years that can read the disk image, you should be pretty
safe. Even when keeping all the packages things like fonts, PDF libraries
etc. can still change.
Besides that, you can also just keep the PDF, assuming you don't change
your thesis anyway after you've handed it in. I'm pretty sure PDFs will
still be readable in ten years.
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