Where are conflicts between biber and biblatex?

Question

I have seen they're are a lot of problems between biber and biblatex on fedora, but I need it! I have fedora 20 with texlive-full and biber version 1.8 because of the old age of texlive fedora package but it doesn't work on my tex files.
The same file on Archlinux' TeX Live distribution works. So I imagine this is a dependency problem.

here the log error :

Use of uninitialized value $name in lc at
/usr/share/perl5/Biber/SortList.pm line 87.

Use of uninitialized value $lssn in concatenation (.) or string
at /usr/share/perl5/Biber.pm line 682. Use of uninitialized value
$lname in concatenation (.) or string at
/usr/share/perl5/Biber.pm line 682.

INFO - This is Biber 2.0 (beta)
INFO - Logfile is 'These.blg'
INFO - Reading 'These.bcf' 
WARN - Warning: Found biblatex control file version 2.5, expected version 2.6
INFO - Found 84 citekeys in bib section 0
INFO - Processing section 0
INFO - Looking for bibtex format file './partie2/biblio-partie2.bib' for section 0
INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8
INFO - Found BibTeX data source './partie2/biblio-partie2.bib'

Edit : with biber 1.8

INFO - This is Biber 1.8
INFO - Logfile is 'These.blg'
INFO - Reading 'These.bcf'
INFO - Found 84 citekeys in bib section 0
INFO - Processing section 0
INFO - Looking for bibtex format file './partie2/biblio-partie2.bib' for section 0
INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8
INFO - Found BibTeX data source './partie2/biblio-partie2.bib'

    Process exited with error(s)

What @egreg is asking is, what exactly are you running? Which version of TeX Live? Did you get it from your linux dist? Information information information. — daleif, Jul 22 '14 at 14:54
I did a lot of tests, but actualy it'sa Tex Live from fedora official repos. For biber I have tried biber 1.8 and 1.9 (this one make the info message)... — delaye, Jul 22 '14 at 14:57
Your version of biber must match your version of biblatex. You might consider ditching Fedora's TeX Live packages and installing from upstream. If you want the latest things, that's the way to go (and works perfectly fine - at least, I'm using TL 2014 on Fedora 19 and on Arch Linux at the moment). — cfr, Jul 22 '14 at 15:17
@cfr ok for a ditching, but I don't know how it works on fedora ? On arch and the AUR repo it's easy, but on fedora !! for exemple I don't understand why whit texlive-full I haven't acces tu tlmgr ... what I would like is that biber works. — delaye, Jul 22 '14 at 15:41
I didn't use the AUR package. I just used upstream's installer on both systems. — cfr, Jul 22 '14 at 17:37
I just followed the instructions provided by upstream here. To follow the recommendation about not installing as root, I created a new user. See this question for some further help. That focuses on Debian but should be easy to adapt. My answer there explains how to avoid installing as root if you wish to do so. The only real difference involves setting up the dummy texlive packages to fool your package manager as that is distro-specific. — cfr, Jul 22 '14 at 22:19
Let me know if you want info on setting that up. There may be an AUR package for Arch - I'm not sure - but it is easy to roll your own for Arch and not that much more difficult for Fedora. — cfr, Jul 22 '14 at 22:20
for arch there is no problems... and I have maid a lot of PKGBUILD for AUR... But for fedora I'am a lost noobe. Why we can't run install-tl as root ? — delaye, Jul 23 '14 at 06:55
@delaye You can run it as root if you want. Upstream advise not to. Most people do it anyway. — cfr, Dec 13 '14 at 22:13

Johannes_B · Answer 1 · 2015-09-20T13:59:40.763

5

Package biblatex and bibliography processor biber are developed very closely. So, to use the latest features of biblatex, you need the latest version of biber as well. The documentation of biber has a compatibility matrix to show which version of biblatex works best with which version of biber. You will get a warning by biber if something is odd:

WARN - Warning: Found biblatex control file version 2.5, expected version 2.6

In general, keeping both up-to-date will ensure functionality.

Some Linux distributions provide a pretty old version of TeX Live and its packages. That is why some people suggest the TeX Live as distributed by the TeX User group which can be found at TUG.org.

In the past, MikTeX did not include biber in its 64-bit version. If you want to use biber with an old 64-bit MikTeX, you have to download it from the project home page and copy it to a place where it can be found by the system. A MikTeX update is highly recommended, though.

edited Sep 20 '15 at 13:59

answered Dec 13 '14 at 16:07

Johannes_B

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thanks... I have resoled this problems with a fresh install of texLive using [this exemple] (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1092/how-to-install-vanilla-texlive-on-debian-or-ubuntu)!! – delaye Dec 15 '14 at 23:05
I'm currently on a campaign to rid TeX.SX of the "64-bit MikTeX doesn't ship with Biber" comments. Would you mind adding a short notice that Biber has finally made it to 64-bit MikTeX? – moewe Sep 20 '15 at 06:48
@moewe Thanks, did the change. Is it ok? – Johannes_B Sep 20 '15 at 11:15
Thank you. It might be better to put the "If you want ..." sentence into past tense, to make sure that now it is enough to just install Biber via the MikTeX package manager (after a database synchronisation if need be). – moewe Sep 20 '15 at 12:47

Where are conflicts between biber and biblatex?

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