textlive-bibtex-extra and biber conflict

Question

This is a fresh install of Kubuntu 16.04 with all the latest updates applied.

I installed all of texlive: apt install texlive\* and then tried to install biber: apt install biber which wants to remove texlive-bibtex-extra. Trying to install both together: apt install biber texlive-bibtex-extra gives the following error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
texlive-bibtex-extra is already the newest version (2015.20160320-1).
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 texlive-bibtex-extra : Breaks: biber (< 2.4) but 2.3-1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Does anyone have any insight into why the biber package is out of date wrt the texlive-bibtex-extra dependency?

I know I can grab the texlive distribution directly, but I would like to use the package manager if possible.

Answer 1

Based on this bug report, it looks like what you've found (and what I've also just encountered) is a bug that didn't get fixed in time for 16.04 .

Someone on that page suggested a workaround which involves downloading biber from source. You can consider that until it is finally fixed?

(Just tried it myself and confirmed that it works.)

(Edit: Note that it seems (the older) biber version 2.4 should be used. A newer version doesn't seem compatible with the biblatex that comes with Ubuntu 16.04)