2025-11-24T16:13:44+0100 Marco van Hulten <marco@hulten.org>:
> Hello,
> 
> Attached is a new port for manipulating BibTeX entries.  I have used it
> for the last decade or so for sanatising BibTeX entries (typically, for
> any newly downloaded work) and redirecting this to my BibTeX database.
> Sometimes I use it to search the database.
> 
> For a more complete description of its functionality, see its homepage:
> 
> https://www.gerd-neugebauer.de/software/TeX/BibTool/en/
> 
> I'd be happy to maintain this.
> 
>  Marco

Hi Marco,

Thanks for working on this. I haven't tested bibtool yet since I have
some initial remarks about the port:

- The trailing en/ needs to be removed from SITES to fetch the sources.

- I'd prefer if HOMEPAGE pointed to the english version of the website,
  i.e., please add the trailing en/ here. I assume this was your initial
  intention and accidentally switched it with SITES? With this, you can
  do SITES = ${HOMEPAGE:S|en/$||}.

- The kpathsea library is picked up at configure time if found. The
  install documentation (see install.tex) mentions that the usage of
  this library is experimental and that it is only used to search for
  BibTeX files. If you don't need it, maybe we could disable it with
  CONFIGURE_ARGS = --without-kpathsea, so as to avoid having
  print/texlive/base as a build dependency?

- Why is print/texlive/base needed as a runtime dependency?

- Bibtool depends on an old version of the GNU Regular Expression
  Library that it bundles. I don't know if we could pull this from base
  or a port. I'd wait for feedback on this.

- Lots of warnings at build time? Can anything be done about this?

I'll try to take another look later if I find some time.