[Fedora TeX Live] biblatex-apa requires biber now, packaging Biber?

[Michael J Gruber]

Alexander van Loon venit, vidit, dixit 21.02.2012 20:44:
> Hello all,
> 
> First of all I'd like to thank Jindrich Novy and everyone else who is
> working on getting the LaTeX packages in Fedora up to date. Before
> Fedora I used Ubuntu which has totally outdated LaTeX packages,
> requiring me to download quite a few packages manually. You all rock for
> making the life of LaTeX users a lot easier! Hope this still makes it to
> Fedora 17.
> 
> However, there is a problem. When my system downloaded an update for the
> biblatex-apa package recently, I observed that using this package no
> longer worked because it now requires biber.
> 
> The description of the package
> texlive-biblatex-apa-2011-8.4.4.svn25208.noarch.rpm which was uploaded
> on 04-Feb-2012 08:08) according to
> http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2011/packages.fc16/ reads:
> 
> This is a fairly complete biblatex (v0.9a+) style (citations and
> references) for APA (American Psychological Association) publications.
> It implements and automates most of the guidelines in the APA 6th
> edition style guide for citations and references with a few (documented)
> exceptions (which are mainly currently impossible to automate in
> principle for any BibTeX- backed system). An example document is also
> given which typesets every citation and reference example in the APA 6th
> edition style guide. This version of the package requires use of
> biblatex v1.4 and biber v0.9 (at least).
> date: 2012-01-25 23:56:43 +0100
> 
> In the documentation for biblatex-apa which available here
> http://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-apa the following can be read in the
> section 'Important Changes':
> 
> 4.5
> biber is now required. This is because APA style needs a custom sorting
> scheme and only biber supports this. bibtex support is going away in
> biblatex eventually anyway so it’s best to switch.
> 
> More research revealed that a bug report requesting to package biber was
> filed two years ago – https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584063
> – but was refused on the grounds that TeX Live didn't include it because
> it had too many Perl dependencies. However, since a year ago –
> http://www.texdev.net/2011/03/10/biber-now-in-tex-live-2010/ – it has
> been included in TeX Live 2010.
> 
> Also read https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/ where
> it says in the README that they distribute binaries now which don't
> depend on Perl.
> 
> Given that biblatex-apa and biblatex itself in the future will require
> biber and the problem of Perl dependencies and non-inclusion of Biber in
> TeX Live seems to have been solved now, would it be possible to package
> Biber for Fedora?

It is still mostly the same situation, and Jindrich's suggestion from
2010 (as per bz) stands: package biber as a standalone package.

Packaging a biber binary (as shipped by TeXLive) is a no-go, it violates
several Fedora policies. Therefore, Jindrich can't build it directly as
part of the texlive repo for Fedora[*].

biber can still be packaged as a separate package for Fedora, though. We
probably have all the libraries in Fedora already. perl packagers to the
front :)

Cheers,
Michael

[*] If the texlive->fedora scripts allow building biber in a different
way, i.e. not as a "binary" including the perl libs, but as a proper
perl package with perl lib dependencies, that would be the best solution
because it would keep the biber package in sync with the texlive
packages. But I don't know those scripts.