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On 21/04/2010 16:59, Jindrich Novy wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:20100421145902.GA30664@dhcp-lab-133.englab.brq.redhat.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi Robin, Victor,
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 09:57:20AM -0400, Victor Ivrii wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Robin Fairbairns
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:Robin.Fairbairns@cl.cam.ac.uk"><Robin.Fairbairns@cl.cam.ac.uk></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Jindrich Novy <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:jnovy@redhat.com"><jnovy@redhat.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I have another request from Fedora TeX Live user who would like to see
biber in TeX Live:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584063">https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584063</a>
What do you think? Could biber coexist with bibtex in TeX Live?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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.
Thanks again!
Jindrich
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I concur with Alex and Robin (as well as Norbert's comments in the
previous thread "Changes for 2010?"): Incorporating Biber in TeX Live
is definitely not feasible for TL 2010 and would require absurdly
disproportionate efforts from the part of the TL maintainers. However
we (the two Biber devs) have plans to solve
this issue, hopefully before TL 2011. The idea is to ship a single
script with embedded PAR archive that will contain all dependencies.
The only requirement to run it will then be Perl 5.8.x or later (with
core modules). For that we need to first setup a robust build
environment that will work on all platforms supported by TL. This is
not a trivial task, but it is feasible.<br>
<br>
For the time being we indeed encourage distributors to package Biber
separately if they can (as it
is already done for instance in Arch Linux:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=36407">http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=36407</a>). Having packages for
Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu would be nice too.<br>
<br>
I should also point out to Victor that most of the <font
face="sans-serif">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.</font> (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:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<font face="sans-serif"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/forums/forum/824416">http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/forums/forum/824416</a>
. We will gladly help!<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
François Charette<br>
<br>
</font><u><br>
</u>
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