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

[B Wooster]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 6:25 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> B Wooster a écrit :
>> 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).

> If your machine is too short of disk space to install scheme-full, then
> you can try to keep a copy of tlnet on an external medium (2G USB sticks
> are pretty cheap nowadays).
> Manuel.

Thanks - that is easily doable - I have other computers with lot of
space, so, as Philip Taylor also pointed out - when I do my 2009
update, if I just burn a DVD or two, I should be able to point tlmgr
to that when needed for local updates and re-installs, I understand.

I do have a suggestion - since most people expect things to be around
for 3-5 years (I can update old Linux distributions with yum or dpkg
as appropriate), if texlive is going to be obsoleted within a year,
would be nice to document it to avoid the confusion:
1) tlmgr should report a better error message other than "location
unusable" - which sounds like all one needs to do is to fix the
location - but a better message would have been "2008 is now obsolete,
no updates are available. Please install the current latest texlive
for updates".
2) http://www.tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html should say which version it
refers too and also state when old versions are obsoleted. Certainly
should mention in the Disaster Recovery that the update tool should
only be run on TL-2009 etc.

This seems like a topic that was well known to texlive users, but
casual users would find it very hard to find the info - web searches
as well as mail archive searches did not easily yield correct
information.