Ken Moffat wrote:
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.
You are probably right. I would count the number of LFS users who need
to use bibtex from source in the low single digits. To be honest, I
don't build it myself. I download a subset of the binary files with
install-tl.
-- Bruce
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