Over the past few years, the biblatex package has been developed by Philipp Lehman to be the leading method for creating bibliographies in LaTeX. The combination of biblatex with Biber is even more powerful: arguably the most complete solution to database-driven bibliographies available.

Philipp Lehman has done a massive amount of work to get us to this position, and has until recently been very reactive to user feedback. However, over the past few months no-one has heard from him. Philip Kime has posted to (de.)comp.text.tex about this: it seems that the TeX community as a whole know very little about Philipp Lehman beyond his e-mail address! (A number of avenues have regrettable given no more information.) Any information, or indeed contact from Philipp, would be great.

Philip Kime has some patches for biblatex which are not in the CTAN release and which improve interaction with Biber. He’s therefore created a ‘caretaker’ clone of biblatex on GitHub, so that these are no ‘lost’.

What happens next of course depends on whether Philipp Lehman reappears: clearly the best outcome. There are no urgent bug fixes or changes needed at the moment, so until after TeX Live 2012 is finalised there is no appetite to take any further action. That can’t go on for ever, of course, so if there is still no contact by the time of the TeX Live freeze then steps will have to be taken. Anyone interested in volunteering to help if that is needed should get in touch!