[tex-live] biber in TeX Live

[Alex Hamann]

On 21.04.2010, at 21:09, Philipp Stephani wrote:

> 
> Am 21.04.2010 um 16:59 schrieb Jindrich Novy:
> 
>> Hi Robin, Victor,
>> 
>> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 09:57:20AM -0400, Victor Ivrii wrote:
>>> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Robin Fairbairns
>>> <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>> Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> I have another request from Fedora TeX Live user who would like to see
>>>>> biber in TeX Live:
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584063
>>>>> 
>>>>> What do you think? Could biber coexist with bibtex in TeX Live?
>>>> 
>>>> surely, linux distros are in a better position to provide a separate
>>>> biber (rpm|deb) than tl is to provide one of its packages?
>>>> 
>>>> the problem is the large number of perl dependencies, which is surely
>>>> "run of the mill" for you, but definitely stressful for tl.
>>>> 
>>>> and in any case, you could surely put a biber rpm on the road well
>>>> before tl 2010 is likely to be released?
>>>> 
>>>> robin
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I compiled biber on MacOSX and it was a bit tedious and annoying
>>> experience as not only few perl modules biber depends on were missing
>>> (it would be easy as biber can retrieve and install them on its own)
>>> but they were depending on the modules which were also missing and ad
>>> nauseum and  there biber could not help I was forced to go down.
>>> 
>>> I suspect that if TL includes biber it would be a full time job to
>>> answer enquiries.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Victor
>> 
>> Thanks for your opinions. I haven't had any experiences with biber so
>> far so now I can at least guess why incorporating biber into TeX Live isn't
>> too good idea.
> 
> On the contrary, one could also say that Victor's experiences speak in favor of the inclusion of Biber into TeX Live. Currently every Biber user has to compile it for themselves, and that is simply too unfriendly for normal users.


Right but please have a look at the thread I pointed to in my previous post. The maintainers have made it quite clear that they are aware of all these arguments but will not include biber due to the dependencies.
Also, I have compiled biber on my Mac too and once I found out that you can very easily install per modules via cpan on the command line the compilation process was actually rather easy.

Alex