On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Sanjoy Mahajan
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