[task #15267] Building TeXLive from source

[Boud Roukema]

Follow-up Comment #8, task #15267 (project reproduce):

I'm trying to understand Raul's comment here:
https://gitlab.com/makhlaghi/maneage-paper/-/issues/9 , which seems to be
explained by TeX live doing some sort of overall system update every April.

It should be possible for a user in Raul's situation to prefer to use his/her
local tarballs from a previously installed version of TeX live, rather than to
update. After all, we lose reproducibility if it is no longer possible to use
an old version of a software package.

But Raul, if I understand this particular situation correctly, my guess is
that this is probably a result of you requesting to install a particular TeX
live package _foo_ from the 2020 version, while your Maneage system has the
2019 TeX live version with zillions of individual packages, but the particular
package _foo_ is missing. So it's not strictly reproducibility of a project,
it's an extension of an "existing" (unfinished :)) project. Is that right? If
so, then this doesn't count as a reproducibility problem, it seems to me.  It
seems reasonable that TeX live doesn't want you to mix up 2020 _foo_ with the
2019 TeX live overall system.


I guess this could raise the question of what should be doable in the
situation where someone really *wants* to install the 2019 _foo_ in order to
minimise the overall deviation from the original project. What should s/he do?
 Someone who knows enough about TeX live might wish to search for a modular,
human-readable solution.

An overlapping question is whether tarballs for TeX live should be
automatically created or not. I get the impression that currently they are
_not_ stored. I don't see them in _.build/software/tarballs/_ . CTAN has been
around for a long time. How reliable is long-term CTAN archiving of old
versions?


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