On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 01:29:01AM +0000, Ken Moffat wrote: > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 04:37:46PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > Looking at this page I also see biblatex-biber.tar.gz. We already > had one > of these in the system, but the present one is a different size > and (of > course) md5sum. How is a user supposed to know what's current? >
Since we support past releases, the correct answer is probably "check the version mentioned in the book you are using, and if in doubt use tar -tvf biber.tar.gz | head, or check the md5sum". > > > > It's really not acceptable to have the same name but different directories. > > I know this is an upstream issue, but can you ask them to make a properly > > versioned tarball? > > > > -- Bruce > > > I can try, but I very much suspect that the answer will be along > the lines of "the directories are versioned" - i.e. both the > directory from which we download, and the directory name in the > tarball. > > For my local copies, I have renamed them to -1.8, -1.9. Would that > be a suitable workaround for an LFS copy ? We do already keep our > own copies of packages taken from git. In any case, I doubt > that upstream will care to rename an existing tarball. > Actually, after firing off that response when I saw the question, and then sleeping on it, two further points: 1. I think that BLFS should NOT be trying to dictate things to upstreams : we are a minority interest, best not to upset people when you can probably count our users who build things exactly by the book in the low hundreds. Certainly, if I was maintaining a package where the tarball name worked for my main users (in linux that is texlive, but there is also at least one mac TeX distribution) and had perhaps been determined by the original author, I would be decidedly unimpressed. If people follow the instructions in the book (whether that is 7.6, past svn, or current svn) they should be able to get the correct version from sourceforge. On that basis, and particularly since this is not an issue with the current -devel version of biber (we don't use that), I am now not willing to raise an issue for this at github (and that is the only means I have for contacting the maintainer). 2. No idea how the mirror infrastructure is set up (I occasionally grab individual files using firefox, but that is all) - could we not have versioned directories for biber, like at sourceforge. and each containing the appropriate biber.tar.gz, perhaps with an md5sum ? As to determining that there is a new version - for texlive my preference is not to care unless there is a known problem. Let it carry on until the 2015 texlive release. If somebody else cares sufficiently about texlive to want to keep ALL of it up to date, they can step forward. If not, 1.9 fixes the problem I was seeing in LFS-7.6 - before perl-5.20 I had not tried the UTF-8 code which showed this problem in xelatex, but in the last few days I tried 1.8 with perl-5.18 (LFS-7.5) and did not see the problem. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-book FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
