Biblatex fails due to version mismatch

[MTRNord]

tectonic fails to build with the 2020.0r0 bundle and biblatex:

Running external tool biber ...
error: the external tool exited with an error code; its stdout was:

===============================================================================
INFO - This is Biber 2.17
INFO - Logfile is 'default.blg'
INFO - Reading 'default.bcf'
ERROR - Error: Found biblatex control file version 3.7, expected version 3.8.
This means that your biber (2.17) and biblatex (3.14) versions are incompatible.
See compat matrix in biblatex or biber PDF documentation.
INFO - ERRORS: 1
===============================================================================
error: its stderr was:

===============================================================================
===============================================================================
error: the external tool exited with error code 2

any ideas how I can fix that?

[pkgw]

My guess is that the best fix will be to upgrade to the soon-to-be-released next version of Tectonic that will bump us up to TeXLive 2021.3! I will try to get it done today.

[MTRNord]

Hm I tried now with version 0.9.0 of tectonic and the newer bundle, and it seems that suffers from a different but essentially the same issue:

RROR - 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
===============================================================================
error: its stderr was:

===============================================================================
===============================================================================
error: the external tool exited with error code 2
[Finished running. Exit status: 0]

biblatex is now slightly newer, but the error still happens. Biber I guess is from my MikTex install, which should be up-to-date.

[KevoSoftworks]

I'm running into the same issue as well. A workaround to this problem is to downgrade biber to version 2.16.

[pkgw]

OK, well, the upgrade to TeXLive 2022.0 should happen much faster since the diffs are comparatively small and lots of good infrastructure is now in place, and maybe that will make biber 2.17 happy ...

[doronbehar]

I'm still experiencing this issue now, with tectonic 0.9.0 😭. Is there a --web-bundle url I can give to it that will fix it? Please 🙏.

[charmoniumQ]

@doronbehar My work around is to build the current master branch of tectonic from source. The easiest way to do that is a Nix flake (which also takes care of dependencies). Note that this version of Tectonic works with a different (older?) bundle in Tectonic.toml. If you see error: expl3-code.tex:22489: Invalid code (13), should be in the ranges 1..4, 6..8, 10..12, that is a problem with the bundle. I found the right bundle by using tectonic -X new.

tldr:

$ url=https://www.toptal.com/developers/hastebin/tulajibike.properties
$ curl $url > flake.nix
$ nix develop --command tectonic -X new test
$ diff test/Tectonic.toml Tectonic.toml
$ nix develop --command tectonic -X build

[WtfJoke]

Downgrading biber to 2.16 worked for me (with tectonic 0.9.0)

[Neved4]

As of currently, tectonic 0.11.0 now works with biber 2.17, but gives the same problem with last biber 2.18.

[Neved4]

For people who don't need to use TeX Live alongside tectonic, dropping the first and installing biber separately is easier than juggling the the two installs in the same system.

Under macOS brew's biber version is currently 2.17 one can simply:

brew install tectonic
brew install biber

To get a working tectonic/biblatex setup.

[MTRNord]

As of currently, tectonic 0.11.0 now works with biber 2.17, but gives the same problem with last biber 2.18.

Previously tlextras-2021.3r1.tar as bundle fixed it for me, so I wonder is there a newer bundle that we can try to work around this by any chance? (turns out it is incredibly difficult to find bundles)

Edit oops tlextras-2022.0r0.tar is merged but that has another conflict :) So I mean newer than that

[pkgw]

@MTRNord Do you mean that there is an even newer version of biber that requires a newer version of the biblatex package? I don't anticipate upgrading Tectonic's built-in biblatex until TeXLive 2022.1 comes out, but if there's an incompatibility it will probably be worth taking extra steps. (It would be nice if biber/biblatex didn't keep breaking compatibility, though!)

I'm sorry that the bundle infrastructure has not been well-documented. For what it's worth, with the current setup, this file should start accumulating a helpful list of bundle URLs going forward ...

[Neved4]

@pkgw I confirm: there's an even newer version of biber: 2.18 that requires a newer version of biblatex. We're good on the next to last one, see: #893 (comment). I can reproduce and share a test file if needed.

[pkgw]

Thanks for confirming @mnrvwl . I'm not familiar with biber/biblatex (as is probably quite clear by now). Does anyone know what the maintainers of those tools generally recommend that people do in order to keep things compatible? Unless I'm missing something, the latest release of TeXLive is 2022.0 has the older biblatex that will be incompatible with this new release. It seems like that would be a problem for a potentially large number of users. Do they tell people not to upgrade biber until the new TeXLive release comes out? Do they expect people to upgrade their biblatex package out-of-band with regards to the TeXLive releases?