I heard about issues with porting texlive to FreeBSD and that there were two competing ports, of which one has been released but rejected, while another is being anticipated but not released… But no idea of when this situcation may resolve itself with a release. Does anyone know the status/timeline for porting texlive to FreeBSD?
[Tex/LaTex] Texlive on FreeBSD – status
texlive
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On miktex I would run updmap --verbose >updmap.log and updmap --verbose --admin>updmap2.log (--admin is the miktex equivalent of updmap-sys). And then I would check in the log-files which .cfg are used and which map-files are written and sort things out in an editor.
The best solution here by far is to install vanilla TeX Live as explained in answers on this site and in the official instructions.
There is some confusion, I think. In general, there is a difference between what is needed to build a binary and what is needed to use it. The quotation from biber's documentation is saying that perl is not needed to use pre-built binaries. When you try to build the backports package, however, you are trying to build the binary and that is what requires perl 5.16, it seems.
You could obtain the binary from Sourceforge, for example. However, you would need to ensure that you get the right biber for the version of biblatex you have. Moreover, you will need to re-backport and recheck etc. each time the backported package is updated.
In contrast, if you install vanilla TeX Live, you can keep everything current using tlmgr without having to compile anything. This is, to say the least, extremely nice. It also avoids a lot of messing about trying to figure out which package contains what in Debian's ecosystem. (This is not a criticism of Debian's packaging but if you basically want all of TeX Live, say, it is simpler to just install it.)
I think if somebody is happy with the version of TL which their distro provides, sticking with it makes a lot of sense. But once you are unhappy with it, vanilla TL makes a lot more sense IMHO than the alternatives. It is simpler, easier to maintain, more transparent and cleaner. It also allows you to install TeX Live as an unprivileged user, as recommended by upstream. (Note: hardly anybody seems to do this except me but, being me, I think it an advantage.)
Best Answer
TeXLive is now usable on FreeBSD. There is a texlive-base and texlive-texmf port. If you don't want install from port you can install from packages.
So: it's 100% ready-to-use (I'm using almost one year without any problem).