3

An update to biblatex and/or biber altered the bibliography output of biblatex-chicago and is creating a problem with a project's required bibliography format (which used to work). Still trying to find a workaround or fix, but meanwhile need to get the project out to production asap.

Can someone walk me through where to find old versions and how to revert to older package versions with TexLive? The solutions in "Is there a way to revert manually to earlier versions of a package?" and the other questions linked in it no longer work, since the repositories referenced either no longer exist or do not contain the packages I need.

Community
  • 1
JSCard
  • 366
  • You can get older biblatex versions here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex/files/, and biber here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/ (pay attention to the OS). biblatex can go in your texmflocal, biber somewhere in the path (you can also rename it to e.g. "biberold.exe". – Ulrike Fischer Mar 06 '17 at 22:08
  • Related/duplicate: Historical, stable version archive of packages – Werner Mar 06 '17 at 22:10
  • TeX Live saves old packages by default locally, so unless you've disabled this, you probably already have what you need. – cfr Mar 06 '17 at 22:38
  • @Werner, I found that question too through the link noted in my question. Unfortunately, the links in that answer are no longer active and Martin's Sharrer's new site only has packages that he is actively working on. – JSCard Mar 07 '17 at 13:37
  • @UlrikeFischer, Thanks, that's exactly what I needed. I found those last night too after I left work, since my office network blocks sourceforge for some reason. – JSCard Mar 07 '17 at 13:41
  • So, the answer seems to be a combination of @UlrikeFisher and @cfr...? Not sure how to give you both credit... – JSCard Mar 07 '17 at 13:46
  • It seems @UlrikeFischer helped you more, so ask her to write an answer. Or we could mark this as a duplicate. – cfr Mar 07 '17 at 17:44
  • @Scard: Thanks for mentioning this. I've changed my accepted answer in Historical, stable version archive of packages. I think the link to https://ctanmirror.speedata.de/ would have what you need. – Werner Mar 07 '17 at 20:07

2 Answers2

4

TeX Live keeps backups of packages by default so that you can revert changes in case an update causes problems.

tlmgr restore biber

will list available revisions for biber

Available backups for biber: 42078 (2016-12-22 15:30)

I have the number of backups made automatically set to 1. I don't recall whether this is the default or not.

Similarly,

tlmgr restore biblatex

tells me

Available backups for biblatex: 42092 (2016-12-22 15:30)

To actually restore, you need to specify the revision number along with the package. See the manual page for tlmgr for details.

cfr
  • 198,882
  • Excellent, thank you. Unfortunately, the default on mine is set to retain only one prior version. Apparently the change happened at some point before that... – JSCard Mar 07 '17 at 13:44
1

You can get older biblatex versions here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex/files/, and biber here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/ (pay attention to the OS).

biblatex can go in your texmflocal, biber somewhere in the path (you can also rename it to e.g. "biberold.exe").

Ulrike Fischer
  • 327,261