[64bit] Biber packaging questions

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

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.

> 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.

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).  It is also much easier to build once you 
have all the modules built, e.g.:

NAME="biber"
VERSION=1.5
RELEASE=1
CATEGORY="Text"
SUMMARY="BibTeX replacement for users of BibLaTeX"
DESCRIPTION="Biber is a BibTeX replacement for users of BibLaTeX. Biber
supports full UTF-8, can (re-)encode input and output, supports highly
configurable sorting, dynamic bibliography sets and many other features."
HOMEPAGE="http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/"
GIT_URI="git://github.com/plk/biber.git"
# remove the 'v' for 1.6
GIT_TAG=v${VERSION}
inherit git perl

HTH,


Yaakov