Texlive old install support

[Joseph Wright]

On 15/04/2020 02:51, Eduardo Ochs wrote:
> A few months ago I had to install Texlive 2016 and Texlive 2017 in my
> Debian box for a paper that uses biber and that I needed to upload to
> arxiv... arxiv wouldn't run biber on it itself, so I had to generate a
> .bbl using the right version of Texlive.
> 
> I took "executable notes" of everything that I did - in the sense of
> <http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html> - and the commands that I
> gave for Texlive 2016 were these (note that some lines are sent to the
> shell and some others to install-tl):
> 
> --snip--snip--
> 
> export S=$HOME/snarf
> mkdir -p $S/http/ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2016/
> cd       $S/http/ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2016/
> wget -nc  http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2016/texlive2016.iso
> wget -nc  http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2016/texlive2016.iso.md5
> md5sum -c  texlive2016.iso.md5
> 
> mkdir -p    /tmp/loop
> sudo umount /tmp/loop
> sudo mount -o loop,ro \
>    $S/http/ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2016/texlive2016.iso
> \
>    /tmp/loop
> 
> cd /tmp/loop/
> sudo ./install-tl
> D
> 2
> /usr/local/texlive/2016/texmf-local
> 7
> ~/.texlive2016/texmf
> R
> O
> Y
> R
> I
> 
> --snip--snip--
> 
> To compile my paper with the old Texlive, what I did was:
> 
>    export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2017/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
>    which lualatex
>    which biber
> 
>    # Some kind of "make clean", then:
>    lualatex         2019J-ops.tex
>    biber            2019J-ops
>    pdflatex -record 2019J-ops.tex
> 
> I think that if half a dozen people could share their recipes for
> installing old Texlives then we can consider that we've done our part,
> and we can delegate the next steps to people who are more web-savvy
> and more end-user-savvy than us...

That all seems rather 'heavy'. As detailed in 
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25089/how-to-install-a-package-from-an-older-version-of-texlive, 
one just needs

tlmgr option repository 
ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/<year>/tlnet-final

Joseph