How to keep biber working

How to keep biber working

[Jelle Licht]

Guix,

I've noticed some time ago that the biber version that we currently have
is incompatible with the texlive revision we have packaged.

Incidentally, since the latest core-updates merge, biber does not pass
its test suite anymore due to the hardcoded
`perl-unicode-collate'-related hashes. I think we need a more
sustainable (and dynamic) fix for this, as this is not the first time
this has happened.

As far as I know, biber has no dependents other than itself. I could
also downgrade it 2.11 so it works with our texlive packages
again. Should I simply revert the "gnu: biber: Update to 2.12." commit,
or only adjust the [source] and [version] fields of the biber package?

I can push a short-term fix that involves disabling the test suite for
biber nonetheless, as this seems to be required for both version 2.12
and 2.11.

Thoughts?

Re: How to keep biber working

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org> writes:

> I've noticed some time ago that the biber version that we currently have
> is incompatible with the texlive revision we have packaged.
[…]
> Thoughts?

We should update texlive.  The latest tagged release according to
https://tug.org/svn/texlive/tags/ is “texlive-2019.3”.

Whoever upgrades this would have to ensure that *all* hashes for all SVN
checkouts are updated.  Who would like to start a new branch for this?

-- 
Ricardo

Re: How to keep biber working

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org> writes:
>
>> I've noticed some time ago that the biber version that we currently have
>> is incompatible with the texlive revision we have packaged.
> […]
>> Thoughts?
>
> We should update texlive.  The latest tagged release according to
> https://tug.org/svn/texlive/tags/ is “texlive-2019.3”.
>
> Whoever upgrades this would have to ensure that *all* hashes for all SVN
> checkouts are updated.  Who would like to start a new branch for this?

I know it's been a while, but what about the wip-texlive* branch with
the texlive importer?  We could easily import the 2000 packages once
it's done.

Personnally I just need the time and money to get down to it :p

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to keep biber working

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>
>> Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org> writes:
>>
>>> I've noticed some time ago that the biber version that we currently have
>>> is incompatible with the texlive revision we have packaged.
>> […]
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> We should update texlive.  The latest tagged release according to
>> https://tug.org/svn/texlive/tags/ is “texlive-2019.3”.
>>
>> Whoever upgrades this would have to ensure that *all* hashes for all SVN
>> checkouts are updated.  Who would like to start a new branch for this?
>
> I know it's been a while, but what about the wip-texlive* branch with
> the texlive importer?  We could easily import the 2000 packages once
> it's done.

It’s really not that easy.  The plain text database lacks crucial
information to write working package definitions in all cases.

For files that are generated there usually is no real build system
(e.g. some lua file should be executed with certain arguments and the
result copied *somewhere*), we’re even lucky if there’s a makefile (that
has non-standard targets and won’t actually work.

Many packages can easily be “built” by processing the dtx files, but the
texlive-build-system still doesn’t do the right thing when it encounters
directory instructions (it just places *all* generated files in a
directory called “build”).

I’m afraid the texlive importer will have much less of an impact than
we’d all wish.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: How to keep biber working

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> I’m afraid the texlive importer will have much less of an impact than
> we’d all wish.

Hmm... it seems to work for Nix though.  Am I mistaken?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to keep biber working

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>
>> I’m afraid the texlive importer will have much less of an impact than
>> we’d all wish.
>
> Hmm... it seems to work for Nix though.  Am I mistaken?

It’s one thing to install all files that the plain text database says
should be installed.  They all exist in the SVN repo.  It’s quite
another to generate them all from their respective sources.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: How to keep biber working

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> It’s one thing to install all files that the plain text database says
> should be installed.  They all exist in the SVN repo.  It’s quite
> another to generate them all from their respective sources.

Nix separates them all, it provides the 2000+ packages.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to keep biber working

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>
>> It’s one thing to install all files that the plain text database says
>> should be installed.  They all exist in the SVN repo.  It’s quite
>> another to generate them all from their respective sources.
>
> Nix separates them all, it provides the 2000+ packages.

This does not contradict what I wrote.  *Building* the packages differs
from just copying the generated files to their expected locations.  I
doubt Nix actually generates all these files from source.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: How to keep biber working

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> This does not contradict what I wrote.  *Building* the packages differs
> from just copying the generated files to their expected locations.  I
> doubt Nix actually generates all these files from source.

Indeed.  We discussed this some time back: we can come up with a build
system / importer that tries to generate the file the best it can, and
if it fails to produce the expected output, we can fallback on copying
the SVN files.  Not ideal, but better than what we have now ;)

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to keep biber working

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 10:04:26AM +0200, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
> 
> > This does not contradict what I wrote.  *Building* the packages differs
> > from just copying the generated files to their expected locations.  I
> > doubt Nix actually generates all these files from source.
> 
> Indeed.  We discussed this some time back: we can come up with a build
> system / importer that tries to generate the file the best it can, and
> if it fails to produce the expected output, we can fallback on copying
> the SVN files.  Not ideal, but better than what we have now ;)
> 

TeX is like black magic to me. The only thing I have to add is that
Debian "compiles" (or however it works) as a post-install hook, and they
have a DD who also works on TeX itself. However, as a binary
distribution, they have no incentive to break it up into smaller pieces.
Gentoo might be better with that, but I have no idea.


-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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Re: How to keep biber working

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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I know that OpenSuse also breaks TeXlive into the 2000+ individual packages.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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