Welcome to Biber-OpenBSD 👋

Needed files for building Biber on OpenBSD

Biber OpenBSD

Notations on working directory

Some people do not like to clutter up their home directory (I am poking fun @madaalch), where some people are of the exact opposite affinity. This is more or less simply differences in philosophical perspectives of Unix. This being said, the work directory for this installation can be where ever and whatever you want it to be, ~/Sandbox is used to conserve the effort of the Author, as at the time of writing ~/Sandbox/ was already referenced by the build files. In retrospect, a more traditional working directory would have been /opt or /usr/src.

If you decide to use another working directory other than ~/Sandbox/ then you will need to edit the build files to reflect this change. To make things painfully obvious, the "build files" are the files located in dist/OpenBSD of this repository.

BibLaTeX by @madaalch

In order for biber to work, it needs a compatible version of BibLaTeX. Once you have verified that biber is functioning and have copied it to the bin directory of your choice run biber --version and make note.

To find the compatible version, visit the biber documentation page and in biber.pdf look at compatibility matrix. Download the corresponding version of BibLaTeX from sourceforge

Run kpsewhich -var-value=TEXHOME and make note of directory; (it should be ~/texmf; if this doesn't exist then create it). cd to directory which contains the downloaded biblatex-*.tgz. tar -zxvf biblatex-*.tgz -C ~/texmf where * is the version you have just downloaded. texhash ~/texmf

NOTE after running the above command, kpsewhich -var-value=TEXHOME will no longer print anything.

Now go back to the ~/Sandbox/biber/testfiles directory and pdflatex test ; biber test ; pdflatex test. Open the test.pdf; if you have no errors then your test.pdf will list a single successful reference.

Back up the document that you wish to run biber with. Run pdflatex yourdocumentname ; biber yourdocumentname and check for errors. Note that if your .bib file's name contains 12 or more characters you will get an error, (example bibliography.bib will be truncated to bibliograph.bib, which biber will not be able to find.) if needs be rename it to biblio.bib or something similarly short. Now recompile your document and you should have all your beautiful references sorted.

Preliminary Decisions

You can spend time trying to get the perlbrew installation script working in an alternate shell (e.g., ksh, zsh), but it's easier to just install bash. Most of us already have bash installed on our system, but if you haven't done so yet, it's a good time to consider it and join the cool kid club.

doas pkg_add -U bash

Now your ready for the installation.

Installing Biber on OpenBSD

It's time to play everyone's favorite game, "Do as I say, not as I do."

As you perform this install, keep in mind, you do not want to use sudo or doas for any of the following commands, nor do you want to perform these steps as root. Doing so will result in the corruption of your system's perl distribution.

Install Perlbrew

To install Biber on OpenBSD, Perlbrew is required. The installation script for perlbrew is below.

curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

Once complete, open your shell's rc file and ensure the following lines are in it.

source ~/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc

This can be done with a quick grep, cat ~/.bashrc | grep perlbrew, and if you do not see it you can use echo to add it, echo "source ~/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc" >> ~/.bashrc.

Setup Perlbrew

You will need to use perlbrew to build and install the latest stable perl release. This will take several minutes to compile.

perlbrew install perl-stable > /dev/null 2>&1 | tail -f ~/perl5/perlbrew/build.perl-*.log

Next install cpm, the perl package manager. If your not familiar with cpm, it is a little different from cpan, but it is much faster. Cpm by defaults install packages by creating a local folder for perl libraries, and places the installed packages there, this is not what we want. What we want is for cpm to install packages in perlbew’s path where perlbrew can find it. This is done with use of the -g flag. Everytime you run cpm, you will need to use the -g flag, which tells cpm the packages are to be installed for global use, just like you would with npm.

perlbrew install-cpm

Now that perlbrew and cpm are setup, it is best to open up a new shell to prevent any of the environment variables we are about to setup from bleading over into other actions you might do later on.

Once a new shell is open, inform perlbrew you want to use the perl release you just installed.

perlbrew use $(perlbrew list)

This will setup all of those environmental variables we talked about, and should complete the setup of perlbrew for the install.

Create a work directory

For this build to work and have all the preconfigured paths worked properly, a work directory named "Sandbox" will need to be used to contain all the folders and files. If you do not already have a sandbox, go ahead and create that directory.

mkdir -p $HOME/Sandbox && cd $_

Acquire dependencies and source

Go ahead and clone the repository with the source code for biber inside your sandbox.

git clone https://github.com/plk/biber

It is time to install the required perl dependencies for the build, which will be done with cpm. This will be done in two steps as to avoid cpm from returning an error message stating you are missing a required perl library.

# First install the build module to avoid the error.
cpm install -g Module::Build
# Then install the remainder of the dependencies needed for the build.
cpm install -g Readonly::XS Pod::Simple Pod::Simple::TranscodeSmart \
Pod::Simple::TranscodeDumb Pod::Perldoc Text::BibTeX Text::CSV IO::Socket::SSL DateTime DateTime::Format::Builder DateTime::Calendar::Julian XML::LibXML::Simple XML::LibXSLT

Install Perl Packer

OK, I admit it. I screwed up and forgot to mention this the first time I wrote this file.

Before going any further, take the time to install pp the perl packer. Later on, the distribution build script will use pp to package the biber binary you are diligently working to build.

cpm install -g pp

Setting up the repository for a successful build

This is where the other files in this repository play an important role. Take a moment to examine this repository’s tree structure. You will want to follow the same structure when you copy the files from this repository into the root folder of the biber repository you just cloned.

.
|-- README.md
|-- dist
|   `-- openbsd_amd64
|       |-- biber.files
|       `-- build.sh
`-- local
    `-- libcrypt.so.2

Clone this repository and copy it’s files into the Biber Repository

You should still be in the root of your sandbox; if not, cd ~/Sandbox. Clone this repository. In other words, cd...

git clone https://github.com/anoduck/Biber-OpenBSD && cd Biber-OpenBSD

Now copy the contents of this repository into your biber repository, ensuring to maintain the same folder structure.

cp -r dist/openbsd_amd64 ../biber/dist/
# AND
cp -r local ../biber/

This should setup the biber repository for a successful build.

Build biber

Having to rarely compile perl binaries from source, the next few steps threw me for a loop the first time. This is because developers often provide, and sometimes are required to provide, users with different means to install their software. With biber, this is not the case, and perl provides all the flexibility for different platforms one might need.

Change Directory into the biber repository.

cd ../biber

Execute the perl build script

Running perl Build.PL, will generate a script file confusingly labeled "Build". This script will be used to ensure we have satisfied all the required dependencies, build all of biber’s libraries, and prepare the "dist" file for compilation.

# Generate the "Build" script
perl Build.PL
# Use "Build" to confirm the dependencies
./Build installdeps
# Then use "Build" to build biber's libraries
./Build
# Finally install those libraries locally
./Build install

Install btparse

Btparse is "the C component of btOOL, a pair of libraries for parsing and processing BibTeX files."

In order to install the bparse package for perl, you will need to manually install it yourself. This involves downloading the library, compiling it, and installing it in your perlbrew library path. Perlbrew makes doing all of this fairly straight forward.

At the time of writing, the current stable perl release is 5.38.2. This is important, because you need to make sure the downloaded library is compatible with the version of perl you installed. The source code for this package can be found on launchpad. The url for the source archive used to successfully build biber is included in the command below. So, let’s download it (using ftp as it is native to OpenBSD).

ftp https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+sourcefiles/libtext-bibtex-perl/0.88-3build3/libtext-bibtex-perl_0.88.orig.tar.gz

Extract it, cd into it, and run the build script.

tar -zxvf libtext-bibtex-perl_0.88.orig.tar.gz && cd Text-BibTeX-0.88 && perl Build.PL && ./Build

Once successfully built, you will need to move/merge parts of this directory into the biber repo. Specifically, you will need to merge the blib folder from this directory with the blib folder in the biber repository.

# If you use the standard cp
cp -R blib/* ../../blib/
# If you use gnu cp
cp -r blib/* ../../blib/

Finally, build and package biber

Now biber is ready to be built, and it’s about damn time. You will need to change directory into OpenBSD’s distribution specific folder and run the build from there.

cd dist/openbsd_amd64
./build.sh

You might need to update the version number of libraries in build.sh. You may also need to install some (e.g., doas pkg_add gdbm openssl-3.3.2p0v0).

Run the test to ensure it works

Being brutally honest, it took four tries before a functioning biber executable was built. Every one of those four builds completed, but failed to run during testing. So testing your build is important.

To test your newly created binary, you will want to change directories to the "testfiles" directory located in the root of the biber repository. From there, test with the following command.

# Change Dir
cd ../../testfiles
# Now run the test
../dist/openbsd_amd64/biber-2.8.amd64-openbsd7 --validate-control --convert-control test

If the test checks out, you now have a working biber binary.

Wrapping it up

Since the binary we just built is a self extracting archive, containing within itself all the needed libraries to function, it can safely be placed in your path at /usr/local/bin/biber. Which is where Emacs will look for it, in case you are wondering.

As for Perlbrew, you can purge it from your system if desired, but it is recommended to keep Perlbrew installed for future builds of biber. Instead just remove the currently installed perl build and disable perlbrew. This will reduce the overall consumption of disk space greatly.

# See what version of perl you installed
perlbrew list
# And then remove that version. Ex. 5.38.2
perlbrew uninstall perl-5.38.2
# Then disable perlbrew for this shell
perlbrew off

And, with that your done!

Caveats

• Just be aware the executable is built from perl libraries that may not be native to your system. More than likely, this never should be the cause of any issues, but is healthy to keep a mental note of it.

Author

👤 Anoduck

• Website: http://anoduck.github.io
• Github: @anoduck

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📝 License

Copyright © 2024 Anoduck.
This project is MIT licensed. Why this link does not include my username is unknown.

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