norbusan

Oh that one ... we had that down there in Debian at some point. I guess that is easy to fix in latex.ltx from which the format is dumped. Yeah, this time-bomb is a strange thing. I am not happy about it ... but who wants to discuss with the LaTeX maintainers ;-)

Support for older versions, good question. Yeah, I understand the need, but there is a simple reason, manpower. We are quite overloaded with keeping the normal process running. Doing this in parallel is not something we can do.

But, the scripts we use to build the stuff etc are all in the archive and documented, so anyone can checkout the 2010 or older release, and start a separate repository putting only fixes in. I don't see any reason not to do it, besides that nobody will do it.

That is a CTAN mirror, and not a path to a tlnet. You have to use http://ctan.mackichan.com/systems/texlive/tlnet and that works fine.

What do you mean with "fix this mess"? I have done the first packaging of TeX Live ever for Debian in 2005, and I am responsible also for the "mess" upstream, so if you have complains, esp what you want to get "fixed", then be more specific!