Texlive old install support

[Joseph Wright]

On 15/04/2020 09:49, Philip Taylor wrote:
> Joseph Wright wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>
> 
> Does that mean that if I have a TeX Live installation for (say) 2008 
> which was not fully updated during the life of TeX Live 2008, I can 
> retrospectively update it to the pre-freeze-for-2009 version  using the 
> recipe above ?

Oops, sorry, a bit more detail needed.

One can update between *some* TeX Live installs, but it's not really 
recommended. Rather, I'd go to

     ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/

and download the network installer for the year I wanted (they are in 
per-year directories), unpack it then do

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

This is exactly what I did to set up my laptop: that works back to at 
least 2009. (Really, anyone needing TL pre-2009 must have very unusual 
requirements: I tend not to need anything before about 2012 nowadays.)

Joseph