bug#21806: TeX Live: missing biber executable

[Clément <cbarthelemy@fdn.fr>]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Sorry for the late reply.

My turn to apologise for the delay !

> Maybe we should make it a separate package?
> Is the biblatex-biber-1.8.tar.gz available separately upstream?

Apparently, there has been some discussion about whether or not
to include biber in the Tex Live build due to its high
requirements. The current state of affair is as follow¹ :

    Special considerations for biber

    TeX Live includes biber (a BibTeX replacement for BibLaTeX
    users) executables. These executables bundle the many Perl
    modules which biber requires, using the Par::Packer
    mechanism. This process is described in the biber
    documentation; it isn't feasible to incorporate it in the
    standard TL build.

    So, TL builders who wish to provide it should make and upload
    the binaries as part of the upstream Biber project. These
    binaries are then distributed to CTAN (requires a manual
    request to the CTAN maintainers, usually done by the Biber
    maintainers), and TL imports from CTAN as usual.


So I don't know if building it from source is feasible for
Guix. I could try to have a look, but have zero experience with
Guix or Perl build system. Anyway, the biber package is indeed
available on sourceforge².

There is also a compatibility issue between biblatex and biber
(something like biblatex 2.x → biber 1.x) that we should watch
out for.


1: Described on the Tex Live website https://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html#biber

2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/1.8/biblatex-biber.tar.gz

--
Clément