[tex-live] Is tlmgr 2008 now completely unusable?

[Alan T Litchfield]

Just to emphasise Norbert's comments.

You can install a minimal installation of TL2009, and save space as  
you had previously or you can manually install the packages you want  
from CTAN, but there may be inconsistencies between individual  
packages and those that were on TL2008.

As a maintainer of one of the mirrors (elena.aut.ac.nz) the prospect  
of having to ensure sufficient storage space on the server does not  
fill me with joy. Each year TeXlive takes quite a bit of disk space,  
then if you add to that each successive year's new distribution then  
the storage requirements begin to get very large.

For those who volunteer their time to put each year's distributions  
together I doubt they would fancy having to support what are  
essentially obsoleted distributions. That would become more difficult  
as new OS versions are released. When people choose not to upgrade  
TeXLive they will most likely expect continuous support so that they  
can continue to work on new OS versions that did not exist when a  
particular TeXLive distribution was released.

HIH
Alan


On 2/12/2009, at 5:15 PM, B Wooster wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Norbert Preining  
> <preining at logic.at> wrote:
>> On Di, 01 Dez 2009, B Wooster wrote:
>>> Is there any way to make tlmgr run on my what-was-working texlive  
>>> 2008
>>> system? I can live without updates, but wanted to install some new
>>> packages.
>>
>> Then you have to upgrade to TL 2009 by doing a new installation.
>>
>> This was announced several times that upgrades from 2008 to 2009 is
>> not possible and that there will be no updates to 2008.
>
> I was not actually looking for updates, I'm fine with the way texlive
> 2008 works, but I had not installed the full collection and was just
> looking for one more package (xetex).
>
> How should I have prevented this problem? This is on a small machine,
> so cannot install the full texlive collection. But I would like, for
> 2-5 years at least, be able to pick and choose new packages to install
> as the need arises. Updating full texlive every year is just not an
> option.
> I would have thought that even though 2008 may not be updated, surely
> some where there should be a archive kept, so people can add new
> packages or re-install existing packages if needed? Same issue for
> when 2009 moves to 2010, and when 2010 moves to 2011 etc..
>
> I guess I don't fully understand how come there are no 2008 archives
> available (even if they are not updated and are static copies) ...

--
Alan T Litchfield
AlphaByte
PO Box 141, Auckland, 1140
New Zealand
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz
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