[tex-live] historic-texlive: convenient installers for old TeX Live releases

[Szabó Péter]

Dear TeX Live users and developers,

This is to announce historic-texlive: convenient installers for old TeX 
Live releases.

https://github.com/pts/historic-texlive

historic-texlive is a set of scripts and binary executable for Unix for 
easy
and convenient installation of TeX Live 2008--2018. All Unix platforms 
are
supported. Windows (i386-cygwin, x86_64-cygwin, win32) isn't supported.
historic-texlive is useful for compiling old .tex documents reliably, to
reproduce the original output files (.dvi, .ps and .pdf). For writing 
new
documents, the latest release of TeX Live is recommended.

Advantages of historic-texlive over the regular install-tl installer:

* It supports historic TeX Live releases out of the box, without the 
need for
   specifying -repository flags and matching the version of install-tl to 
the
   repository.

* It lets the user specify the platform, e.g. if the user asks for
   i386-linux, then neither install-htl (the historic-texlive installer) 
nor
   tlmgr will install binary executables for other platforms (e.g.
   x86_64-linux). (install-tl doesn't respect the user's choice this 
way.)

* It contains a few bugfixes so the old installer works with newer 
versions
   of Perl.

* It doesn't ask any questions: it does something reasonable by default, 
and
   it can be customized using command-line flags.

* install-htl finishes quickly, because it doesn't download anything: it
   delegates downloading to `tlmgr install', which the user should invoke
   next.

Please note that historic-texlive is a hobby project of mine which I 
hacked
together during the weekend. It's not an official TeX Live product.

If you have any feedback or suggestion for improvement, please let me 
know.
(Please keep my e-mail address in the To: list, because I'm not 
subscribed
to TeX Live mailing lists.)

Best regards,

Péter