[tex-live] biber in TeX Live

[Joachim Schrod]

Victor Ivrii wrote:
> 2010/4/21 François Charette <firmicus at ankabut.net>:
> 
>> I should also point out to Victor that most of the outstanding installation
>> problems reported in the past have been resolved, especially those
>> concerning  the dependency Text::BibTeX (and its underlying btparse
>> library), whose most recent version on CPAN now installs smoothly on most
>> platforms (it used to have been nearly impossible to install on Windows, and
>> was sometimes problematic on Mac OSX too). So it is definitely worth trying
>> again with version 0.53. (Don't forget to run ./Build installdeps after
>> running "perl Build.PL": that takes care of automatically installing all
>> dependencies). If you still encounter problems, you are very much encouraged
>> to report them on the Biber User Forum on SF:
> 
> Well, I was running (sudo) ./Build installdeps
> 
> but it stumbled upon few things so I went to install them manually but
> they had other dependencies missing or not as new as required and
> probably this was a reason. So I went manually down the tree and
> installed biber. True Text::BibTeX had most branching dependencies.

Did you use the cpan command for installation, or did you download
the modules by hand? The latter is a nightmare, the former should
work. Downloading CPAN modules is like installing rpm/deb packages
by hand without using apt/yum/zypper -- a nighmare of dependencies.

If anybody wants to know how to adapt cpan to install Perl modules
in user-specified directories, i.e., outside of system dirs -- I'm
willing to help with information and ready-to-use configuration
files. They solve two issues: (1) It's a way to collect CPAN
modules in a tree that one can ship later. (2) It doesn't update
system modules or vendor-delivered trees. (This may be a problem on
some older distributions, as Zdenek mentioned for RHEL4.)

I've made such support because we had to ship to a customer all
non-core CPAN modules that were used by a Perl application. (Also
ancient RHEL4 btw, so I know the problems Zdenek mentions quite
well.) Just to note: I'm not willing to do that work for biber,
just to get someone started to be able to do it.

Best,
	Joachim

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Joachim Schrod				Email: jschrod at acm.org
Roedermark, Germany