Incompatible biber version with biblatex in texlive

[ggeorgakoudis]

I'm not sure whether this is a bug to report in homebrew issues so I'm asking for guidance.

I've installed texlive and biber through homebrew and the installed biber version seems to be incompatible with biblatex installed by texlive:

ERROR - Error: Found biblatex control file version 3.7, expected version 3.8.
This means that your biber (2.17) and biblatex (3.16) versions are incompatible.
See compat matrix in biblatex or biber PDF documentation.
INFO - ERRORS: 1
Biber error: [206] Utils.pm:409> ERROR - Error: Found biblatex control file version 3.7, expected version 3.8.

Brew config:

HOMEBREW_VERSION: 3.3.16
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew
HEAD: 2dc375acc2fe4e089d103171ec8fb06a87d83bb6
Last commit: 22 hours ago
Core tap ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core
Core tap HEAD: c5a89f1a8c111a1309deecb46f97b5b02fe38ebe
Core tap last commit: 2 hours ago
Core tap branch: master
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /Users/georgakoudis1/homebrew
HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY: /Users/georgakoudis1/homebrew
HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /Users/georgakoudis1/homebrew/Cellar
HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS: []
HOMEBREW_CORE_GIT_REMOTE: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core
HOMEBREW_DISPLAY: /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.NoL8nzoYPW/org.macosforge.xquartz:0
HOMEBREW_MAKE_JOBS: 8
Homebrew Ruby: 2.6.8 => /Users/georgakoudis1/homebrew/Library/Homebrew/vendor/portable-ruby/2.6.8/bin/ruby
CPU: octa-core 64-bit icelake
Clang: 12.0.0 build 1200
Git: 2.24.3 => /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/git
Curl: 7.64.1 => /usr/bin/curl
macOS: 10.15.7-x86_64
CLT: 12.0.0.32.29
Xcode: N/A

Help?

[carlocab]

Yes, biber seems to require biblatex 3.18. See Homebrew/homebrew-core#93820. We should have a CI check that biber is compatible with the biblatex that comes with the texlive formula. Apologies for the inconvenience.

I don't use the texlive formula, so I'm not sure how to fix this until texlive cuts a new release. Is it possible to use tlmgr to update the bundled biblatex? CC @danielnachun @nandahkrishna @branchvincent since I think you might know more about this (or at least know someone who does).

[nandahkrishna]

We should have a CI check that biber is compatible with the biblatex that comes with the texlive formula.

Should we ensure that the biber we package is compatible with the biblatex from texlive even if that version is outdated?

While this would probably be convenient, those who want the latest biber and biblatex would have to write up their own biber Formula for the newer version or install it outside of Homebrew. This also seems like a deviation from our usual philosophy of providing the latest version of packages. In the case where we offer the latest biber and biblatex, the fix is simple (running the 2 commands above). Perhaps we could even add a caveat with this information.

However, what we should ensure is that the latest tagged biblatex and biber versions are actually released: an upstream issue seems to indicate that they are released only when they're uploaded to CTAN, not as soon as they're tagged. I'll modify the livecheck block to account for this sometime today.

[nandahkrishna]

After some experimenting, I think it's non-trivial to update the biblatex that comes with the texlive formula (personally, I use the mactex-no-gui Cask and was misguided earlier). Perhaps Daniel or someone more experienced with texlive than I am could offer some insight here.

[danielnachun]

You probably have to first run tlmgr init-usertree, and then

tlmgr --usermode update --self
tlmgr --usermode install biblatex

We deliberately disabled the use of tlmgr to update packages installed in the texlive cellar because only brew should be making changes to the cellar, and any changes made by the user will be lost upon upgrades. However, tlmgr --usermode is specifically intended for this exact situation, where we don't want to user to touch the cellar installation but want to give them the flexibility to manage TeX packages outside of the main installation. Changes made in --usermode are stored in the user's home directory and will persist over upgrades to texlive. Note that tlmgr --usermode cannot be used to upgrade the compiled Pascal/C/C++ native binaries, but I don't think there is as strong of a dependence on the version of the native binaries as there can be between TeX packages.

[kornai]

Dear @danielnachun With my current setup (macos 13.2.1, texlive installed w/o brew) I'm getting a very similar error:
Found biblatex control file version 3.8, expected version 3.10.
This means that your biber (2.19) and biblatex (3.17) versions are incompatible.

This is after the fix you seggested (I already ran tlmgr --usermode update --self and tlmgr --usermode install biblatex).

[danielnachun]

Possibly our biber formula cannot find your updated version of biblatex? What's the output of kpsewhich -all biblatex.sty? According to here https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/602267/how-to-fix-the-biber-biblatex-incompatibility that is supposed to list all locations where biblatex.sty can be seen.

[ggeorgakoudis]

@carlocab @nandahkrishna thank you for the quick reply and the useful information! I would like to avoid sudo (rootless installation). Is it possible to install an older biber version available that is compatible with biblatex?

[nandahkrishna]

I realise my previous instructions were intended for use with the mactex Cask. If you'd like to install biber 2.16, you'll have to extract that version to a personal tap like so:

# Create a personal tap if you don't have one already. The name doesn't have to be 'personal'.
# If you'd like to create a repository for your tap, you can remove the '--no-git' option.
brew tap-new --no-git ggeorgakoudis/personal

# Extract biber 2.16 to your tap.
brew extract --version=2.16 biber ggeorgakoudis/personal

# Install biber.
brew install ggeorgakoudis/personal/biber@2.16

[ggeorgakoudis]

Thanks @nandahkrishna. I got it up to some point but then failed:

==> Downloading https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/biblatex-biber/biblatex-biber/testfiles/test.bcf
==> Downloading from https://phoenixnap.dl.sourceforge.net/project/biblatex-biber/biblatex-biber/testfiles/test.bcf
######################################################################## 100.0%
Error: biber@2.16: SHA256 mismatch
Expected: 245abe25c586d2ad87782bc113fdf16510e42199bb21f2b143eb64cbe3e54093
  Actual: 7239ac502a8fc6d90fcaf9e9630d939a21e28456312ee7e041f6627ebb8fed24
    File: /Users/georgakoudis1/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/63f9a74c35319565f3dd10cc471d5f7f1573870dd55d677b9c0bb5f9b22d00bf--test.bcf
To retry an incomplete download, remove the file above.

I removed the file per the instructions and re-tried, but same error shows. The hash is mismatching the expected one.

[nandahkrishna]

They update the test files in-place on Sourceforge, so you should probably just remove the resources test.bcf and test.bib, and also edit install and test to remove the portions related to these two files. Here's a patch:

diff --git a/Formula/biber@2.16.rb b/Formula/biber@2.16.rb
index d924fe7..475f2ee 100644
--- a/Formula/biber@2.16.rb
+++ b/Formula/biber@2.16.rb
@@ -500,14 +500,6 @@ class BiberAT216 < Formula
     url "https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/V/VP/VPIT/autovivification-0.18.tar.gz"
     sha256 "2d99975685242980d0a9904f639144c059d6ece15899efde4acb742d3253f105"
   end
-  resource "test.bcf" do
-    url "https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/biblatex-biber/biblatex-biber/testfiles/test.bcf"
-    sha256 "245abe25c586d2ad87782bc113fdf16510e42199bb21f2b143eb64cbe3e54093"
-  end
-  resource "test.bib" do
-    url "https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/biblatex-biber/biblatex-biber/testfiles/test.bib"
-    sha256 "9bc875cdda0093db27f4890dc5801f6677117a495bafd16fa41625441f099368"
-  end
 
   def install
     ENV.prepend_create_path "PERL5LIB", libexec/"lib/perl5"
@@ -515,11 +507,7 @@ class BiberAT216 < Formula
     ENV["PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT"] = "1"
     ENV["OPENSSL_PREFIX"] = Formula["openssl@1.1"].opt_prefix
 
-    testresources = %w[test.bcf test.bib]
-
     resources.each do |r|
-      next if testresources.include?(r.name)
-
       r.stage do
         # fix libbtparse.so linkage failure on Linux
         if r.name == "Text::BibTeX" && OS.linux?
@@ -551,13 +539,6 @@ class BiberAT216 < Formula
 
   test do
     assert_match version.to_s, shell_output("#{bin}/biber --version")
-
-    resource("test.bcf").stage testpath
-    resource("test.bib").stage testpath
-    assert_match "Output to test.bbl", shell_output("#{bin}/biber --validate-control --convert-control test")
-    assert_predicate testpath/"test.bcf.html", :exist?
-    assert_predicate testpath/"test.blg", :exist?
-    assert_predicate testpath/"test.bbl", :exist?
   end
 end
 

[danielnachun]

Our biber version should match whatever is supported by texlive, not the latest version upstream. One of the main advantages of managing TeX through TeXLive is that they try to make sure the versions of the different tools are all compatible with each other. The tradeoff from doing that is that their versions may be slightly behind whatever the latest upstream version of the tools are. However since Homebrew is not a library manager and many TeX packages depend on specific versions of the compiled native binaries used in TeX, we are better off letting TeXLive figure out the right versioning and following what they do.

I don't know if there are any other formulae than biber which depend on TeX components provided by TeXLive, but if there are any, we need to make sure those formulae depend on texlive and are updated in sync with it. In the case of biber it's a Perl script that calls the biblatex binary (and maybe others), so there is no notion of ABI compatibility like we would expect if biber was a native binary that called a shared library provided by TeX. I don't know how common this type of dependency relationship is between formulae but it seems to be more challenging to manage than the more traditional dependency on shared libraries.

EDIT I think I was wrong about biblatex - bibtex is a native binary, while biblatex is just a TeX package. That doesn't really make the dependency management easier, as we only track the version of TeXLive and not individual packages.

[carlocab]

I suggest in the meantime that we carry a versioned biber formula that works with our texlive. Going forward, I'm not sure whether we should delay biber updates to stay in sync with texlive, or if we want to just maintain a versioned biber that always works with texlive, and an unversioned biber that's always the latest version.

[danielnachun]

This is definitely tricky. The user could satisfy the biblatex requirement using a TeXLive install other than our texlive package (MacTex, a host OS package on Linux, or the standalone installer), or by tlmgr --usermode with our package. It feels weird to me to ship a package where the user must take some additional action to satisfy a hard dependency requirement. Vendoring the newer version of biblatex as a resource could also work, but that could create conflicts with the biblatex copy in texlive.

I think a versioned formula for biber which we know will work with texlive does make sense for now, but I'm unsure as to how we'll handle the dependency requirement for the unversioned formula.

[mgenet]

Hello,
A new version of TeXLive (2023) just came out. Would it be possible to have an update of the TeXLive formula, and possibly the biber formula, making them compatible? Unfortunately I have no idea how to do it myself… Thanks in advance for any help!

[SMillerDev]

https://docs.brew.sh/Updating-Software-in-Homebrew

[constcast]

The issue reappeared. texlive was updated to 2024, which ships bib latex 2.19 and biber is at 2.20. To reproduce the problem you can use the following steps:

Install the packages:

brew install biber texlive

Compile the file test.tex with the following content:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{examplecitation,
    author  = {Author, A.},
    title   = {Title of the Article},
    journal = {Journal Name},
    year    = {2024},
    volume  = {1},
    pages   = {1--10},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

\cite{examplecitation}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

using the following commands:

pdflatex test.tex
biber test

The incompatibility will show as:

INFO - This is Biber 2.20
INFO - Logfile is 'test.blg'
INFO - Reading 'test.bcf'
ERROR - Error: Found biblatex control file version 3.10, expected version 3.11.
This means that your biber (2.20) and biblatex (3.19) versions are incompatible.
See compat matrix in biblatex or biber PDF documentation.
INFO - ERRORS: 1

[caiyouy]

i have met the same problem

[caiyouy]

i build biber 2.19 from source, and solve this problem

[cmichi]

I also had the same issue. Worked around it by downloading the biber binary 2.19 from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/.

[NLaws]

using biber 2.19 instead of 2.20 fixed my issue with missing .bcf file (which mysteriously appears and gets deleted during biber run).