Opened 13 years ago

Closed 13 years ago

#30580 closed update (fixed)

biblatex-biber dependencies

Reported by: plk Owned by: drkp (Dan Ports)
Priority: Normal Milestone:
Component: ports Version: 2.0.1
Keywords: biber Cc:
Port: biblatex-biber

Description

Greetings, I'm the biblatex-biber developer using macports software a great deal (for which, many thanks). I develop it on OSX and I noticed that you have all of the perl modules listed as a dependency. This is no longer necessary as biber comes in a binary form for x86_64 and i386 on OSX so you could just package the binary if you wanted - users don't even need perl installed at all to use the binary.

It's also now included in TeX-Live as of TL 2011 (and with updates in TL 2010) so you might not need a port of this at all if you provide TL 2010+ (or if people are using MacTeX which is just TL packaged nicely for macs)

Change History (9)

comment:1 Changed 13 years ago by jmroot (Joshua Root)

Owner: changed from macports-tickets@… to dports@…

comment:2 Changed 13 years ago by drkp (Dan Ports)

Greetings (and thanks for your work on biblatex/biber; I'm looking forward to giving it a try on a paper I'm working on!)

It's by design that we're using the perl modules instead of the binary. Actually, it's also the reason I created a separate port for it instead of using the binaries in TL2011.

This is for all the same reasons that we prefer to install libraries separately rather than statically linking binaries: it keeps people from having to install multiple copies of the perl interpreter and its modules if they need them for separate ports, and avoids the need to keep multiple versions up to date wrt bug and security fixes and the like. Also, for perl in particular, it's likely that most users will have the interpreter and some of the common libraries around anyway, as they're dependencies for many ports.

comment:3 Changed 13 years ago by plk

That makes sense, just thought I'd mention it but it appears that you're on top of it all so just close the ticket.

comment:4 Changed 13 years ago by drkp (Dan Ports)

Which reminds me that I'd actually been meaning to shoot you an email about another matter...

We have 0.9.3 in the port, even though 0.9.4 is available. The reason for that is that I couldn't find a 0.9.4 directory at http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/ -- perhaps an oversight? (We really need to point it toward a specific version rather than 'current')

comment:5 Changed 13 years ago by plk

Ah, yes, the most recent version is always in "current" as TexLive needs a consistent place to pull updates from. If you are using the perl version anyway - you could always pull the master git branch tag for the version (tag is always like "v0.9.4")?

comment:6 Changed 13 years ago by drkp (Dan Ports)

We could, but that would require users to have git installed to fetch it, and it'd be nice to avoid that.

The usual solution to this is to create a separate directory for each release, and make "current" be a symlink to the latest one. Any chance you can do that?

comment:7 Changed 13 years ago by plk

Let me check, not sure if that is possible on SF ...

comment:8 in reply to:  6 Changed 13 years ago by plk

Replying to dports@…:

We could, but that would require users to have git installed to fetch it, and it'd be nice to avoid that.

The usual solution to this is to create a separate directory for each release, and make "current" be a symlink to the latest one. Any chance you can do that?

Seems it can be done, just doesn't play nicely with the web interface which doesn't matter too much. There is a 0.9.4 directory now, you can pull the .tar.gz directly from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/0.9.4/biblatex-biber.tar.gz

"current" is a symlink now.

comment:9 Changed 13 years ago by drkp (Dan Ports)

Resolution: fixed
Status: newclosed

Great, thanks. I updated the port to 0.9.4 in r81782.

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