This PR tests biber with texlive (see #172769 (comment)). The test is currently failing because biber 2.20 isn’t compatible with the version of BibLaTeX installed with the texlive formula.

not sure if we want to merge this as the test is failing for the formula run

@nwhetsell is there a way to patch support for a newer version into texlive that you know of?

@SMillerDev Not easily, as far as I know.

Updating BibLaTeX (however it’s done) should probably happen around here:

(I’m not sure if updating BibLaTeX should happen before or after system "make", "texlinks".) The usual way to update a TeX Live package is to run:

tlmgr update biblatex

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to update a package to a specific version, so TeX Live builds will no longer be reproducible. When installing a TeX Live package, there’s an option to install from a file instead of CTAN, so one could conceivably do something like:

tlmgr install --reinstall --no-depends --file ⟨biblatex package file⟩

The problem here is that package files “must be standard TeX Live package files (with contained tlpobj file)”, and I haven’t been able to figure out where those are distributed.

The only other option I can think of is to install BibLaTeX directly (without using tlmgr). This would probably mean declaring BibLaTeX 3.20 as a resource and then running something like:

system "obuild/build.sh", "install", "3.20", share/"texmf-dist"

However, BibLaTeX’s obuild/build.sh script would probably need to be patched to (at least) ensure reproducible builds. (The build script adds the current date to some files, but this would need to be changed to the date in the CTAN release, 2024/03/21.)

I feel like the biber formula should roll back to 2.19, then work this PR.

Applying this patch to the texlive formula gets the biber test to pass (at least locally):

diff --git a/Formula/t/texlive.rb b/Formula/t/texlive.rb
index 7df957dcb9c..bc65fb10dc5 100644
--- a/Formula/t/texlive.rb
+++ b/Formula/t/texlive.rb
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ class Texlive < Formula
   mirror "https://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/tug/historic/systems/texlive/2024/texlive-20240312-source.tar.xz"
   sha256 "7b6d87cf01661670fac45c93126bed97b9843139ed510f975d047ea938b6fe96"
   license :cannot_represent
+  revision 1
   head "https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source.git", branch: "trunk"
 
   livecheck do
@@ -89,6 +90,16 @@ class Texlive < Formula
 
   fails_with gcc: "5"
 
+  # biber 2.20 requires BibLaTeX 3.20, but TeX Live 2024 ships BibLaTeX 3.19
+  # (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/172769). Install BibLaTeX 3.20
+  # so that biber is functional. This resource and the update of BibLaTeX can be
+  # removed when TeX Live 2025 is released. The string [email protected] should also
+  # be removed from the list of tex_resources in this formula's install method.
+  resource "[email protected]" do
+    url "https://github.com/plk/biblatex/archive/refs/tags/v3.20.tar.gz"
+    sha256 "f936ca60463f47d14ca165226f89388db39080caf49e62fbd36b9787b596b238"
+  end
+
   resource "texlive-extra" do
     url "https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2024/texlive-20240312-extra.tar.xz"
     mirror "https://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/tug/historic/systems/texlive/2024/texlive-20240312-extra.tar.xz"
@@ -347,7 +358,7 @@ class Texlive < Formula
     ENV["PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT"] = "1"
     ENV["OPENSSL_PREFIX"] = Formula["openssl@3"].opt_prefix
 
-    tex_resources = %w[texlive-extra install-tl texlive-texmf]
+    tex_resources = %w[[email protected] texlive-extra install-tl texlive-texmf]
 
     resources.each do |r|
       next if tex_resources.include? r.name
@@ -436,6 +447,16 @@ class Texlive < Formula
     system "make", "install"
     system "make", "texlinks"
 
+    # This can be removed when TeX Live 2025 is released.
+    resource("[email protected]").stage do
+      inreplace "obuild/build.sh",
+                "declare DATE=$(date '+%Y/%m/%d')",
+                # Date from https://github.com/plk/biblatex/releases/tag/v3.20
+                "declare DATE='2024/03/21'"
+
+      system "obuild/build.sh", "install", "3.20", share/"texmf-dist"
+    end
+
     # Create tlmgr config file.  This file limits the actions that the user
     # can perform in 'system' mode, which would write to the cellar.  'tlmgr' should
     # be used with --usermode whenever possible.

I’m not sure if I should add this change to this PR or open a new one.

I’m not sure if I should add this change to this PR or open a new one.

Let's add it here

Will upgrading biblatex potentially cause other incompatibility issues?

@ywwry66 I think it’s safe to say that upgrading anything has the potential to cause incompatibility issues, but I don’t see anything at https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues that indicates BibLaTeX 3.20 won’t work with TeX Live 2024.

It looks like the macOS 14-x86_64 job has stalled.

It looks like the macOS 14-x86_64 job has stalled.

Yup. I'e cancelled it. Will restart it when GitHub catches up with the cancellation.

It doesn’t look like a log is available for the “Linux (deps)” job; I’m not sure what’s causing that to fail.

Would it be possible to re-run the Linux (deps) check, or to a view a log of it?

From the summary, it looks like the failing check isn’t running at all:

This request was automatically failed because there were no enabled runners online to process the request for more than 1 days.

(I’m probably missing something, but I can’t tell if this check is needed. Running brew uses --eval-all biber seems to indicate that there are no core formulae that depend on biber.)