Supporting biber at conda-forge

[anjos]

Hello,

With the maturity of tectonic, and its availability at conda-forge and the conda packaging ecosystem, it looks like we're near the point where we can actually dream of building compact and portable LaTeX compilation systems.

Unfortunately, due to an issue opened for some time now, there seems to exist a strict interdependence between Tectonic and Biber. A precise version of Biber and Tectonic must exist on the same environment so BibLaTeX can be used.

I'd like to include the support for Biber at conda-forge. For such a thing, I was checking out the build instructions for this package (even though I have almost no practice with perl). Looking at how others have bundled it, there seems to be a substantial number of build/runtime dependencies (I counted at least 30) that would need packaging in conda-forge, before biber itself can be ported.

I was thinking that a faster way to implement this support in distributions in general could be to re-use pre-built binaries from Biber's release page. As I understand, it is possible to run this application from a bundle that auto-unwraps and has no other runtime requirements.

Currently no binary packages are available through the release page. Are there any plans to support this? Any community tips on how to approach this problem would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

[plk]

The pre-built "binaries" are all on Sourceforge here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/