[tex-live] biber 2.8 binary for x86_64-darwinlegacy

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 23 November 2017 at 00:09, Karl Berry wrote:
>     nobody thought of updating the script that
>     synchronizes the binaries.
>
> Well, "somebody" thought of that :), but "somebody" also had no *legacy
> binary to work with, and time to follow up with all possible people was
> insufficient :(. For all I knew nobody even used biber/biblatex on
> "legacy" mac so it wouldn't matter. Anyway.
>
>     The binary for i386-darwin is probably ok
>
> Thanks, copied. Should be updated with tonight's build ... -k

Thank you, but that was likely a slight misunderstanding. Biber
provides two sets of binaries: i386-darwin and x86_64-darwin. Sure,
i386-darwin works on all three: i386-darwin, x86_64-darwin and
x86_64-darwinlegacy. It makes no sense though to use 32-bit binary
when 64-bit is available.

So it would be slightly better to copy the binary from x86_64-darwin
rather than from i386-darwin.

To repeat what you probably already know: x86_64-darwin and
x86_64-legacydarwin are in theory "the same". The only difference is
that Dick decided to consciously break backwards compatibility (for
both technical and security reasons), so x86_64-darwinlegacy binaries
would work on all 64-bit macs, while Dick's binaries only work on the
latest three OS versions.

The "just latest three releases" rule doesn't hold for biber which is
compiled independently with a "longer backwards compatibility". So
64-bit binary can be used for both x86_64-darwin and
x86_64-darwinlegacy. Now, it can still happen that biber will one day
cease to work for 10.6, but will still work on 10.9. In that case
darwinlegacy users would still benefit from the binary being present
in darwinlegacy.

Mojca