Should Tectonic grab biber?

[hughesjs]

I understand that biber is technically an external tool, and isn't generally packaged with LaTex distributions like TexLive or MikTex.

However, given that Tectonic is attempting to be a one-and-done command for building LaTex documents and biber being near universally used, would it make sense for it to grab biber too and use that if it detects that it's needed?

[zzamboni]

This would be great to avoid the hard-to-debug error described in #893. If Tectonic automatically downloads and uses the correct version of biber, the incompatibility problem would be solved.

[MadsBuchmann]

That would be awesome! I've been using Overleaf for working with LaTex the last couple of years, but heard about Tectonic recently and downloaded it for the first time yesterday. I tried to build an existing project and was greeted by the error in #893. As the LaTex newbie i am i did not know what this meant and what Biber really is.

Turned out that i apparently had a MacTex installation on my computer which included an incompatible version. Had to uninstall it and download the right Biber version for it to work.

While i managed to figure it out, it took me an hour or so to figure out what really went wrong and how to fix it.

So while technically biber is an external tool as you mention, i think it would make sense for Tectonic to handle this, as from a users perspective it's just annoying and some might just give up. Especially if you're slightly incompetent at using LaTex locally such as i am and come from a tool such as Overleaf.