Hello all, First of all I'd like to thank Jindrich Novy and everyone else who is working on getting the LaTeX packages in Fedora up to date. Before Fedora I used Ubuntu which has totally outdated LaTeX packages, requiring me to download quite a few packages manually. You all rock for making the life of LaTeX users a lot easier! Hope this still makes it to Fedora 17.
However, there is a problem. When my system downloaded an update for the biblatex-apa package recently, I observed that using this package no longer worked because it now requires biber. The description of the package texlive-biblatex-apa-2011-8.4.4.svn25208.noarch.rpm which was uploaded on 04-Feb-2012 08:08) according to http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2011/packages.fc16/ reads: This is a fairly complete biblatex (v0.9a+) style (citations and references) for APA (American Psychological Association) publications. It implements and automates most of the guidelines in the APA 6th edition style guide for citations and references with a few (documented) exceptions (which are mainly currently impossible to automate in principle for any BibTeX- backed system). An example document is also given which typesets every citation and reference example in the APA 6th edition style guide. This version of the package requires use of biblatex v1.4 and biber v0.9 (at least). date: 2012-01-25 23:56:43 +0100 In the documentation for biblatex-apa which available here http://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-apa the following can be read in the section 'Important Changes': 4.5 biber is now required. This is because APA style needs a custom sorting scheme and only biber supports this. bibtex support is going away in biblatex eventually anyway so it’s best to switch. More research revealed that a bug report requesting to package biber was filed two years ago – https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584063 – but was refused on the grounds that TeX Live didn't include it because it had too many Perl dependencies. However, since a year ago – http://www.texdev.net/2011/03/10/biber-now-in-tex-live-2010/ – it has been included in TeX Live 2010. Also read https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/ where it says in the README that they distribute binaries now which don't depend on Perl. Given that biblatex-apa and biblatex itself in the future will require biber and the problem of Perl dependencies and non-inclusion of Biber in TeX Live seems to have been solved now, would it be possible to package Biber for Fedora? Greetings, Alexander van Loon _______________________________________________ TeXLive mailing list TeXLive@linux.cz http://www.linux.cz/mailman/listinfo/texlive
