Re: How do you use old versions?

On Fri, 7 May 2021 10:17:47 -0400
Michael Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:

> So this situation has arisen a few times recently on this list- someone wants to use the latest and greatest but one or more regressions have accumulated and the only fully working version is unsupported old version X.YZ. Ideally those regressions would be solved and we'd all be happily on the latest but that's not necessarily practical or workable in the very short term. It seems like one workaround is for us to plop down on that old working version, but of course the packages have all been removed from the archives. So my question to you is, how would I, for example, install emacs or xfce4 on version 4.0 today? I'm guessing the answer will be cross-compile it on a PC but I'm hoping there's another way.... maybe a mirror of the package archives I'm overlooking? :-)

The latest pkgsrc will not compile on such an old release because much
3rd party software has moved on to require new inventions such as
C++11, go and rust. pkgsrc doesn't officially retire support for old OS
versions but in practice it is bitrotted beyond reasonable repair. In
principle you should be able to cvs checkout a quarterly release branch
of pkgsrc from 2010 or so, and, assuming distfiles have not disappeared
from the face of the Internet it should still work as it did then.

-Tobias