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 Fedora I used Ubuntu which has totally outdated LaTeX packages, 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. _______________________________________________ TeXLive mailing list [email protected] http://www.linux.cz/mailman/listinfo/texlive
