Can I specify TeXLive version to install in the install-tl profile?

Contrary to the accepted answer, it is possible to install an older version of TeX Live by pointing the TeX Live installer to a repository from the archive of historical versions of TeX Live. This is how you would install TeX Live 2015:

./install-tl -repository ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2015/tlnet-final

It may be necessary to use the TeX Live installer for the specific TeX Live version, such as ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2015/tlnet-final/install-tl.zip for TeX Live 2015.

An unofficial convenient installer of old TeX Live releases is now available from https://github.com/pts/historic-texlive .

It works on all Unix platforms, i.e. all platforms except for Windows (or Cygwin).

The TeX Live installer is designed (I believe) to install only the current version of TeX Live, which means older versions are effectively "unmaintained". Of course, usually this is not a problem when you are purposely trying to use or access older packages.

So what you want to do is install the version you need. You can access older versions from this webpage: https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire.html (click on the "Older releases of TeX Live" link).

As each TeX Live release is fairly large, you might want to consider trimming down the files you keep. For instance, in TL2015, the "doc" folder is 1.7 GB while fonts are 1.6 GB. If the purpose of the install is merely so you can recreate a few PDFs (etc.), you might want to consider removing some of the stuff you don't need.

Another idea would be to use the bundledoc and arlatex packages to create self-contained files that include precisely the version of each package which your .tex file needs. For this, you can look at these other answers of mine:

• https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/116797/8528
• https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/153077/8528

Presumably, you could use the bundledoc+arlatex solution after you've installed the historical version of TeX Live of your choice, and then delete all the superfluous packages, fonts, and documentation. This should result in a very small Docker container.