biber-for-tectonic: init at 2.17

The `tectonic` package depends on a version of `biber` that is generally
different from the one in the nixpkgs `texlive` bundle. This package
provides an override of biber suitable for use with tectonic.

For biber<=2.17 on perl>=5.36.0 a patch is needed.
This is recovered from a previous nixpkgs commit:

  https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c784cdbf6b98e3e3aefb678b6ee8309cbb8bee15

Co-authored-by: Mauricio Collares <mauricio@collares.org>
Co-authored-by: Doron Behar <doron.behar@gmail.com>

pkgs/tools/typesetting/tectonic/biber.nix

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+/*
+  This package, `biber-for-tectonic`, provides a compatible version of `biber`
+  as an optional runtime dependency of `tectonic`.
+
+  The development of tectonic is slowing down recently, such that its `biber`
+  dependency has been lagging behind the one in the nixpkgs `texlive` bundle.
+  See:
+
+  https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions/1122
+
+  It is now feasible to track the biber dependency in nixpkgs, as the
+  version bump is not very frequent, and it would provide a more complete
+  user experience of tectonic in nixpkgs.
+*/
+
+{ lib
+, fetchFromGitHub
+, fetchpatch
+, biber
+}:
+
+let version = "2.17"; in (
+  biber.override {
+    /*
+      It is necessary to first override the `version` data here, which is
+      passed to `buildPerlModule`, and then to `mkDerivation`.
+
+      If we simply do `biber.overrideAttrs` the resulting package `name`
+      would be incorrect, since it has already been preprocessed by
+      `buildPerlModule`.
+    */
+    texlive.pkgs.biber.texsource = {
+      inherit version;
+      inherit (biber) pname meta;
+    };
+  }
+).overrideAttrs (prevAttrs: {
+  src = fetchFromGitHub {
+    owner = "plk";
+    repo = "biber";
+    rev = "v${version}";
+    hash = "sha256-Tt2sN2b2NGxcWyZDj5uXNGC8phJwFRiyH72n3yhFCi0=";
+  };
+  patches = [
+    # Perl>=5.36.0 compatibility
+    (fetchpatch {
+      url = "https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/plk/biber/pull/411.patch";
+      hash = "sha256-osgldRVfe3jnMSOMnAMQSB0Ymc1s7J6KtM2ig3c93SE=";
+    })
+  ];
+  meta = prevAttrs.meta // {
+    maintainers = with lib.maintainers; [ doronbehar bryango ];
+  };
+})

pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix

@@ -6689,6 +6689,8 @@ with pkgs;
 
   biber = callPackage ../tools/typesetting/biber { };
 
+  biber-for-tectonic = callPackage ../tools/typesetting/tectonic/biber.nix { };
+
   biber-ms = callPackage ../tools/typesetting/biber-ms { };
 
   biblatex-check = callPackage ../tools/typesetting/biblatex-check { };