[texshop] Error which I don't understand

[Bruno Voisin]

Hi Ulrich,

Following some off-list debugging, and given the somewhat technical and fastidious nature of my last message, here's a summary of the conclusions regarding the error you reported:

- The error message, and the dialog to install the Command Line Tools, came from biber.

- biber, since its version 2.18 (July 2022), is a universal binary. On its first run, the "lipo" utility is called to create a thinned version specific to your cpu architecture (ARM or Intel) in the biber cache.

- Unfortunately, lipo is not part of macOS, it comes with the developer tools (Xcode or the Command Line Tools). This is why installing Xcode fixed the problem for you.

- Actually, the problem is not in biber itself but in the Perl module PAR::Packer with which biber is built. The above (using lipo to extract a thin binary) is the way PAR::Packer is designed to work. Fixing the problem requires changing PAR::Packer.

Philip Kime, the biber author, is aware of the problem and may see with the PAR::Packer maintainer what can be done.

For the moment, the current recommendation is to install the Command Line Tools when offered to do so. Once installed, the Tools are updated by Software Update alongside macOS, so you don't have to do anything and you can forget they are there.

Bruno