[texhax] new installation: biber broken

[Haines Brown]

On Fri, Oct 02, 2015 at 09:45:16AM -0500, Herbert Schulz wrote:
> > On Oct 2, 2015, at 9:00 AM, Haines Brown <haines at histomat.net> wrote:
> > 
> > I was fumbling about trying to customize biblatex-ieee and managed to
> > break TexLive 2014, and so I put it aside and installed TexLive 2015
> > (install-tl-20150930).
> > 
> > With TexLive 2015, biber generates an empty .bbl file. I created a
> > little test file, "test.tex":
> > 
> >  \documentclass[12pt]{article}
> >  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % 
> >  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} %
> >  \usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex-chicago}
> >    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/nat-sci.bib}
> >    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/history.bib}
> >    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/soc-sci.bib}
> >  \begin{document}
> >    citation: (\cite{Barrett2007}).
> >    citation: (\cite{Deacon2008}).
> >    citation: (\cite{Paulus2003}).
> >  \printbibliography
> >  \end{document}
> > 
> > Running pdflatex on it produces no errors but of course warns that three
> > citations are yet undefined.  The .bcf file sees the citations.
> > 
> > I do $ biber --debug test.bcf and get
> > 
> >  INFO - This is Biber 2.1
> >  INFO - Logfile is 'test.blg'
> >  INFO - Reading 'test.bcf'
> >  INFO - Found 3 citekeys in bib section 0
> >  INFO - Processing section 0
> >  INFO - Looking for bibtex format file \
> >    '/home/haines/jabref/nat-sci.bib' for section 0 
> >  INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8
> > 
> >  TeX Output exited abnormally with code 1 at Fri Oct  2 08:46:36
> > 
> > The resulting .bbl file is empty and the PDF does not list any
> > References.
> > 
> > I played with the add bibresource statements and it seems that if
> > nat-sci.bib comes first, it exits with it, otherwise it exits at the
> > second bibresource, regardless of their order and number. It seems that
> > biber exits prematurely for reasons independent of the databases and
> > citations.
> > 

> After installing TeX Live 2015 did you update using tlmgr? I believe there have been updates to biber.

No, I didn't because I figured an installation from CTAN would takes
care of that. But in any case, running $ tlmgr --all did some updating,
but did not fix the problem.