latexindent on ctan: hopeful restructuring

[Karl Berry]

    what do you do for the biber package
    (which is also written in Perl)?

Biber is a singular case. With every other Perl program in TL, of which
there are many, including core functionality like tlmgr, install-tl,
updmap, fmtutil, etc., we simply execute the Perl source script.

However, Biber has a number of dependencies that are not part of
standard Perl (IPC::Cmd, Log::Log4perl, List::AllUtils, maybe more).
Users (of native TL) would have to install all such dependencies by hand
(cpan install ...) before Biber could be run, which would surely induce
yet more dependencies, site-specific problems, etc.

Therefore the Biber maintainer and builders go to the trouble of
building binaries with Par::Packer (not simple), and TL goes to the
trouble of distributing them (also not simple). It is a nontrivial
special case at every level.  Let's not go there for any other program.

Best,
Karl