summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Build/source/utils/biber/README
blob: 945217fd2296bbf2d7f851ce7ab4ebe780f4f55b (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
  Copyright 2011-2013 Karl Berry <tex-live@tug.org>

  This file is free software; the copyright holder
  gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it,
  with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved.

The biber executables we include in TeX Live are created by the biber
maintainers and third-party builders.  They essentially bundle up the
many 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.

Nevertheless, we want the result of TL's "make install" to be the full
bindir contents.  So, we commit here the pre-made binaries for the
platforms for which they are available.  The ones made by the biber
maintainers come through CTAN and our ctan2tl installs them; the ones
made by other folks we add manually here.  In any case, our make merely
checks if an executable is present here in the source directory for the
current platform, and if so, installs it.

The complication is hidden in the phrase "current platform".  TL has its own
ideas about platform names, and the mapping from config.guess output to TL
platform name is not trivial.  Therefore, we use copies of the standard
TeXLive/TLUtils.pm and TeXLive/TLConfig.pm in ../../texk/tests, to avoid
duplicating the platform-detection logic.

The copies in ../../texk/tests/TeXLive are strictly slaves and are kept in
sync via the "srclist-update" mechanism; see Master/tlpkg/dev/srclist.txt.

For any real information about or discussion of biber, please see their
web site at http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net.