Building biber under Linux AArch64

Fork from: https://github.com/krumeich/biber-alpine. For detailed explanations of the setup, visit the original project.

The TeX Live distribution does not provide biber for AArch64-based Linux distros for Raspberry4 or AWS Instance with Graviton Processors.

The repository provides the necessary environment using self-built Docker images and runs the build process of biber itself within this environment.

A test setup allows to verify that the packaging process was successful and no dependency is missing using an scarce Debian image.

The resulting binary can then be packaged and uploaded to https://ctan.org.

Building

The project provides a (GNU) Makefile to ease the build of the Docker images involved and run the Docker container to build and test biber binary.

make BRANCH="v2.18" REPO="plk/biber" test
make BRANCH="v2.18" REPO="plk/biber" package

Alternatively, run:

make BRANCH="..." REPO="..." all

The environment variables BRANCH and REPO allow to access a specific version or the development branch of the repository found at https://github.com/REPO. BRANCH defaults to dev and REPO to plk/biber.

Furthermore, the environment variable DOCKER_TAG specifies which tag for the Docker image sbrass/biber-aarch64 will be used. DOCKER_TAG defaults to latest. The maintainers will keep the version tags of the Docker image in sync with the tags used in this repo. This, in turn, is related to the tag used in the plk/biber repo.

Uploading

The biber binary is packed as biber-linux_aarch64.tar.gz and needs to be wrapped in another archive with the readme from package/README.

mv biber-linux_aarch64.tar.gz && \
  cd package && \
  tar cvf biber-linux.tar.gz README biber-linux_aarch64.tar.gz