id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
5228	TeX Live does not build biber from source	ken@…	ken@…	"I was checking what gets installed by this year's TL (made a fubar yesterday when I tried to do a DESTDIR install, got inconsistent results, so I spent some time doing a fresh real install) and I eventually found that biber does not get installed from the source. Looking further, I discovered that it does not ship the source.

From [http://tug.org/texlive/build.html] I now see:

TeX Live includes biber (a BibTeX replacement for BibLaTeX users) executables. These executables bundle the many Perl modules which biber requires, using the Par::Packer mechanism. This process is described in the biber documentation; it isn't feasible to incorporate it in the standard TL build.

So, TL builders who wish to provide it should make and upload the binaries as part of the upstream Biber project. These binaries are then distributed to CTAN (requires a manual request to the CTAN maintainers, usually done by the Biber maintainers), and TL imports from CTAN as usual.

The link is to http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/ which eventually allows access to the sources at the Project Page (the Download link is binary) at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/

At the moment, the latest version is 1.9, but the tarball name is unversioned."	enhancement	closed	normal	7.6	BOOK	SVN	medium	fixed