On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 09:26:56AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> We haven’t yet updated the big texlive and texlive-bin packages to the
> 2017 versions.  (Actually, I have tested an update for the texlive-bin
> package, but not for “texlive-texmf”.)
> 
> If we upgrade those two, I’m pretty sure we won’t need Biber 2.5 any
> more and can replace it with what is currently biber-next.
> 
> I would suggest not to spend too much time on Biber 2.5 as it is on its
> way out — it just needs a texlive-texmf update.
> 
> (All of our small tex packages are from the 2017 release of TeX Live.
> We really should just upgrade texlive-texmf and texlive-bin.)
> 
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> -(define texlive-bin
> +(define-public texlive-bin
>    (package
>     (name "texlive-bin")
> -   (version "2016")
> +   (version "20170520")
>     (source
>      (origin
>       (method url-fetch)
> -      (uri "ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2016/texlive-20160523b-source.tar.xz")
> -      (sha256 (base32
> -               "1v91vahxlxkdra0qz3f132vvx5d9cx2jy84yl1hkch0agyj2rcx8"))))
> +     (uri (string-append "ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/pub/mirror/tex-archive/systems/"
> +                         "texlive/Source/texlive-" version "-source.tar.xz"))
> +     (sha256 (base32
> +              "0m49ggzgx777nhziji3a5834nfsz87b7k5v546spr7m2kym35860"))))
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I'll try these changes this weekend, unless someone beats me to it --
that would be nice :) AFAIK it's the last blocker for core-updates.