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Re: [64bit] Biber packaging questions


On 6/13/2013 6:09 AM, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
On 2013-06-12 09:10, Ken Brown wrote:
Here are my questions:

1. Should these build prerequisites be added to the 64bit distro?
Otherwise it will be difficult for others to rebuild biber from source.

These should be added to both, although I suspect many are noarch, so
you should only need to build some of those once.

I'll go ahead with this for the 64bit distro now, and handle the 32bit distro later. The differences in the way Perl modules are handled makes it difficult to treat the two distros in the same way. I hope they will eventually be in sync.

By the way, I'm also going to have to add perl-Unicode-Collate, which will become obsolete once Perl is updated, because the version of Unicode::Collate included in perl-5.14 is too old.

2. Biber requires perl 5.16 or later, so I did a quick and dirty build
of perl-5.16.3.  By "quick and dirty" I mean that I simply took Yaakov's
perl.cygport and removed all patches that wouldn't apply.  This is no
problem for *users* of biber.exe, since the latter includes the perl
DLL.  But again it makes it difficult for others to replicate the build
until the official perl is updated.  I have no idea what to do about
this.

Based on the sources, only the latest biber-1.6 requires 5.16; biber-1.5
uses 5.14, so let's stick with that version until we upgrade Perl.

OK, that's a good suggestion. It means I'll also have to downgrade the version of biblatex that's shipped with TeX Live 2013, but that's no big deal.

BTW, because of long-standing issues with SF.net's FRS wrt multiple
files with the same name, I suggest you fetch this from upstream git
instead.

3. There is a completely different approach I could take.  Namely, I
could simply package Biber as a perl module and forget about packing it
into a Perl Archive.  If I do this, then users will need perl 5.16 or
later, as well as most or all of the perl modules listed above, so the
RFU will have to wait for a perl update; but that's probably not
serious.  Would this be preferable?  I'm not aware of any Linux distros
that do this, though someone did do it unofficially for Fedora:

   http://www.linux.cz/pipermail/texlive/2012-August/000563.html

I strongly recommend this route.  For one, it is probably faster (not
having to decompress so much on the fly), but more importantly, it does
not involve bundling code (which is to be avoided for the same reasons
as static library linkage).

That's my preference too. In fact, I had already built and tested this using essentially the same biber.cygport as the one you suggested.

Ken


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