Re: How to keep biber working

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

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