Latex: biber and biblatex versions not compatible

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1

Hi, I am currently using lualatex to compile my document without problems. But I recently tried out tectonic, because it offers a more “luxurious” interface. But it seems, that it has problems because the biber (2.19) and biblatex (3.17) versions are not compatible (which is also documented in the biber and biblatex documentation, in the compatibility matrix).
A common fix for this problem, as stated in this github issue, is to downgrade biber to version 2.17. This seems to be very hard on fedora, as the 2.17 version is not available at the mirror (?).

So my question is, if the default biber and biblatex versions are incompatible and maybe biber should be upgraded (or even biblatex upgraded)?

Disclaimer:
I don’t have deep technical knowledge of fedora, nor latex.

Edit:
Thanks for @ ankursinha for pointing out the solution at Biblatex fails due to version mismatch · Issue #893 · tectonic-typesetting/tectonic · GitHub

2

Hi @mobergmann , welcome to the forum.

The Fedora maintainers tend to keep the two in sync—sometimes they may be out of sync while one is rebuilt to follow the other but this shouldn’t happen frequently. I use LaTeX every day and am not currently running into this issue on both my Fedora 40 and 41 systems. Here are the versions of tools I currently have:

$ biber --version
biber version: 2.19

and:

$ grep "abx@version{.*}" /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty 
\def\abx@version{3.19}

(This is on Fedora 40. I’ll also check my Fedora 41 systems when I get home.)

3

Added latex

4

Same on F41. So they should match as per the compat matrix.

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5

Please compare your output from the following commands (run in a terminal):

  • dnf info texlive-biblatex | head -10 to show which biblatex package you have:
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Installed packages
Name            : texlive-biblatex
Epoch           : 11
Version         : svn66403
Release         : 73.fc41
Architecture    : noarch
Installed size  : 2.2 MiB
Source          : texlive-2023-73.fc41.src.rpm
From repository : fedora
Summary         : Sophisticated Bibliographies in LaTeX
  • kpsewhich biblatex.sty - to verify tht you are using the Fedora package version
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty
  • grep "abx@version{.*}" /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty to verify the locally installed version gives \def\abx@version{3.19}
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6

For me the output is the same:

~ dnf info texlive-biblatex | head -10
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Installed packages
Name            : texlive-biblatex
Epoch           : 11
Version         : svn66403
Release         : 73.fc41
Architecture    : noarch
Installed size  : 2.2 MiB
Source          : texlive-2023-73.fc41.src.rpm
From repository : fedora
Summary         : Sophisticated Bibliographies in LaTeX

~ kpsewhich biblatex.sty
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty

~ grep "abx@version{.*}" /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty
\def\abx@version{3.19}
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7

Can you please tell us where you have installed tectonic from? Perhaps it’s bundling some texlive packages which are causing the mismatch.

Does a file compile correctly without using tectonic, on the terminal for example?

8

I used the recommended install procedure from their website and installed it into a folder in my path:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL https://drop-sh.fullyjustified.net |sh

I also tried to use their latest release AppImage, but it suffered the same issue.

9

I’d try a simple file without tectonic to check if that works. I had a look at the issue you’ve linked to, and it appears that tectonic bundles some bits of texlive—that’s probably what is creating the conflict here. The version of TeXLive that tectonic bundles is probably different from the system install. If tectonic includes a package manager, I’d just use the packages it installs and get rid of any system installed texlive packages—because one cannot really trivially downgrade the version of biblatex easily on Fedora: we only provide one version of TeXLive per release.

Have you tried the workarounds listed in the issue, by the way? For example:

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10

Have you tried the workarounds listed in the issue, by the way? For example:

Ah, you are right. Running tectonic -Z search-path="${$(kpsewhich biblatex.sty)%/*}" main.tex “fixes” the issue. I didn’t try it because I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. AFAICT, are we just telling Tectonic that it should use the system-installed texlive packages, where the biber and biblatex versions are in sync? In other words, we don’t mix the tectonic and biber versions.
I think Tectonic’s claim is to compile reproducible documents, which is not really the case when using system packages, but for me, this is not a big issue.

There are still others here who have expressed the same issue as me. If they could say this also fixes their problems, I will close this issue.

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11

Yeh, well to be specific, we’re asking it to use the system installed biblatex package. I’m not sure where it picks biber from (or where it was picking biblatex from before). That’s why I thought tectonic must also install some packages which were creating the conflict.

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