On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Sanjoy Mahajan <sanjoy@mit.edu> wrote:

> Thanks, Mojca.  Inspired by your suggestions, I did the following (which
> should work on Ubuntu too, but I am using Debian testing
> a.k.a. stretch):
>
> $ dpkg --add-architecture i386
> $ apt update
> $ apt install libc6-i386
>
> and voila my old binaries from the minimal worked!
>
> There were other issues that aren't so easy to solve:
>
> 1. asymptote meanwhile is at version 2.35 instead of 2.31, which affects
>    figure sizes slightly.
>
> 2. graphviz and dot (for all the tree diagrams) were at version 2.26 and
>    are now at 2.28, which affects figure sizes somewhat and their layout
>    slightly.
>
> 3. Inkscape was 0.48 and is now 0.91.  That affected the conversion from
>    svg to eps of one figure.  That I worked around by just using the
>    previously converted eps figure instead of the svg.
>
> All the changes above can affect the page and line breaks, but I tweaked
> a bit until that didn't happen.
>
> It does show a general problem with large complex documents regarding
> software versions.  ConTeXt is the fastest-changing component, but the
> other components also change, and one needs a way to preserve the entire
> software stack.
>
> That's a software-engineering problem, and maybe others have found
> solutions?
>
> My first book (_Street-Fighting Mathematics_) is frozen with its typos
> because I cannot reproduce its stack at all, so all the new printings
> get the old typos.  Through bad luck, at the time (2009) I happened to
> have a never-released version of the tex fonts, now long overwritten by
> proper versions, and I also didn't use a ConTeXt minimal back then, so I
> don't have the other binaries and TeX in the right form.
>
>


Have you seen this site ?

http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/

-- 
luigi