biblatex-biber @0.9.3 About dependence between 'biblatex-biber' and 'texlive-bibtex-extra'

[jean-sims@…]

In this post, I used the following notation to avoid confusion between MacPorts package and LaTeX packages:

• [MP] is used for MacPorts packages
  
• [LTX] is used for LaTeX packages

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I was looking for installing 'biblatex' [LTX] on my MacPorts distribution. The only MacPorts package I found with biblatex keyword was 'biblatex-biber' [MP] which does NOT install 'biblatex' [LTX] (which is in 'texlive-bibtex-extra' [MP]) but only install the 'Biber' compiler needed by the 'biblatex' [LTX].

I looked in the previous tickets and saw that 'biblatex-biber' [MP] depends on 'texlive-bibtex-extra' [MP] and that 'biblatex-biber' [MP] has been documented to explain this dependence. These are good points to understand what is going on.

But I'm pretty sure that people who are using only some package of 'texlive-bibtex-extra' [MP] (like 'bibunits' [LTX] or 'jurabib' [LTX]) but NOT 'biblatex' [LTX] do not want 'Biber' to be installed (which depends on Perl => lot of space on the disk). However, people which install 'biblatex-biber' [MP] wants to have 'biblatex' [LTX] installed (I do not think that 'Biber' can be used in other way).

Anyway, we could create a 'texlive-biblatex' [MP] in the MacPorts distribution which only install 'biblatex' [LTX] and depends on 'biblatex-biber' package (bi-directionnal dependence). Moreover, it should be easier to maintain backward compatibility between 'Biber' and 'biblatex' [LTX] if 'biblatex' [LTX] has is own package (which is not the case for now).

[jean-sims@…]

Cc Me!

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

The reporter is automatically Cc'ed.

[jean-sims@…]

Replying to macsforever2000@…:

The reporter is automatically Cc'ed.

Thank you, I discovered that but this CcMe! button is really attractive and I was curious :-).

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

I'm not too keen on splitting biblatex off into a separate package, but it might not be a bad idea to not depend on biber by default. Mostly, I try to keep the texlive packages installing everything that upstream TeX Live does, but we've made some exceptions for other packages that have a lot of dependencies (xindy, asymptote, etc.).

(And note that biblatex is still useful without the dependency, as it can be used with bibtex instead of biber.)

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

I am removing biblatex-biber as a dependency of texlive-bibtex-extra as part of the TeXLive 2012 update (see r95307; not merged to trunk yet). We'll leave it out of the default texlive install, but allow people to install it separately.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

...and now merged in r95340.