as expected, you also stumbled on that. I was fed up with the old biber in Debian so I decided to give it a shot and remove Data::Diver from the biber code. It only uses the Dive function, and none of the exotic features of Data::Diver.

I have created a Dive function in Biber::Utils.p, and removed all the references to Data::Diver in Build.PL, META.*, lib/Biber/Entry.pm, lib/Biber/Internals.pm.

The function is trivial, it does not implement everything, but I guess it is enough for biber at the moment.

If anyone wants to comment on it, here it is:

sub Dive {
  my ($ref, @keys) = @_;
  return unless defined($ref);
  for my $k (@keys) {
    if ($k =~ m/^-?\d+$/) {
      $ref = $ref->[$k];
    } else {
      $ref = $ref->{$k};
    }
  }
  return $ref;
}
[download]

Unfortunately Debian is going through perl transition to 5.18 now, so many of the necessary modules are still not updated, so I cannot run tests with actual biber, but I tried the calls in the POD docs of Data::Diver and they worked as expected.

Let us extended that function a bit and provide a replacement for Data::Diver if the author does not want to provide a license.

Norbert, TeX Live Team & Debian TeX Team