biber-1.9

[ken@…]

I had hoped to keep the TeX Live source packages in the versions shipped - even biber, where a 1.8 tarball is shipped in texmf. But I've been struggling with a bug - "key" fields in a bib file using (in general) non W. European letters break the document with the message:

Cannot decode string with wide characters at /usr/lib/perl5/5.20.0/x86_64-linux/Encode.pm line 215.

I had found some examples (E. European latin letters) and was surprised to find they did not work. Google results suggest this is because perl module Encode.pm (part of the core perl distribution) no longer accepts already-decoded text.

On my system which still has a binary, these key fields work. I had initially assumed that the binary version was using an old version of perl (it bundles up the modules in the binary!). But after discussing this with the maintainer, and confirming that the current development version is fine, I tried using v1.9 (with biblatex-2.9a which it requires). I've just installed that on a clean 7.6 system, and all is fine.

Previously I had advised people (in the biber page) not to use 1.9 because it was broken, but that was fixed in git in July with a two line change (I'll try a sed now that I know it works). The important thing is that this version no longer uses Encode.pm.

Fun. This took weeks to resolve, but I think I have learned a little from it.

[ken@…]

Committed in r14721 - no comments on the content, so I assume it is ok.