@string issues with current Biblatex/Biber: how can I stop my authors undergoing existence failures?

Question

My bibliography set-up relies extensively on BibTeX strings. Until very recently - just now, essentially - this worked fine. Now, however, it works hardly at all.

Here's a minimal example. I'm not entirely sure what the crucial elements are, but if I combine abbrv2.bib with abbrv3.bib, the problem disappears.

\begin{filecontents}{abbrv2.bib}
%:punctuation - but use Biblatex macros where possible!
@string{/                               =   {\addslash }}
@string{name-some   = {Name, Some}}
\end{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{abbrv3.bib}
@string{great-stuff = {Great } # / # { Stuff}}
\end{filecontents}


\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{name-fascinate,
  author  = name-some,
  journal = great-stuff,
  pages   = {34--67},
  year    = 1765,
  volume  = 3,
  number  = 2,
  title   = {Fascinating Finds}}
\end{filecontents}


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\bibliography{abbrv2, abbrv3, \jobname}
\begin{document}

\autocite{name-fascinate}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Note the lack of an author in the bibliography entry.

My real document has no authors, journals, publishers, addresses, joining words ....

What is the cause? (Please don't say this is a new feature!) How can I avoid the problem (Can I avoid the problem?) without reverting to BibTeX? Reverting to BibTeX would be a great deal of work, but probably significantly less than doing away with the use of @string.

Answer 1

This was a temporary Biber issue. It was solved in version 2.10 of Biber. See https://github.com/plk/biber/issues/204