[tex-live] Biber in TeX Live?

[François Charette]

Robin Fairbairns wrote :
> Philipp Stephani <st_philipp at yahoo.de> wrote:
>
>   
>> are there any plans to include the current beta version of the BibLaTeX
>> backend Biber in TeX Live?
>>     
>
> hmm.  i think i approached the biber people about putting a copy on
> ctan: all i can find of that is a message saying that my mail to the
> developers' mailing list had been frozen.  i appear to have dropped the
> ball on that.
>   

Strange, I don't remember seeing this message... Sorry. In any case, let
me state that I am very much in favour of putting biber on CTAN. But I
have decided to wait for the release of biblatex 0.9, when the biber
backend becomes officially supported. 

> i did exchange mail with francois charette (and you?) 
no, that must have been another Philip(p)!

> about listing it in the faq as a part of the brave new bibliography world along with
> biblatex (which was there already).
>   
BTW, in the entry
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=biblatex> please change
"the generation multilingual citations" to "the generation of
multilingual citations" at the end.

> they certainly haven't submitted anything, or suggested that we should
> pull something and put it on the archive.
>
> so perhaps they don't consider themselves ready for wider dissemination
> of the package?
>   

Exactly. As long as biblatex itself is not included in TL, there is no
point in having biber. And as we are currently going through an active
development phase, we would rather recommend interested users to try the
development version of biber (via git) instead of relying on some beta
snapshot. Note also that the biblatex option "backend=biber" is not even
yet documented (and was consciously not mentioned in the latest release
notes). The situation will certainly have changed dramatically by the
time TL 2010 is released :)

François