BibLaTeX styles use invalid options

[LaTeXer]

When using the acmart BibLaTeX styles, the build fails due to invalid options.

MWE:

\documentclass{article}
% or \documentclass[sigconf,natbib=false]{acmart}

\usepackage[style=acmnumeric]{biblatex}

\begin{document}
\end{document}

fails with

…/texmf-dist/tex/latex/acmart/acmnumeric.bbx:885: Package xkeyv
al Error: `halid' undefined in families `blx@opt@pre'.

See the xkeyval package documentation for explanation.

The same is true for style=acmauthoryear. Copying the style file to the local build directory and removing the offending line triggers similar errors for swhid, swlabels, vcs, and license. Once all these are gone, everything seems to work fine.

[SECtim]

I had the same problem, until it just went away - I investigated and found that these options are part of the biblatex-software package, which seems to be relatively recent.

In particular, my TeXLive distribution (2019) did not contain that package; after upgrading to TeXLive 2021, these options no longer lead to errors (if you're on Ubuntu >= 22.04 (jammy) or similar, look for the texlive-bibtex-extra Ubuntu package; note: prior LTS versions of that package do NOT contain biblatex-software).

In other words, instead of messing with the .bbx file, do one of the following:

• Update your TeX distribution
• Install biblatex-software manually
• Put software.bbx from the biblatex-software package next to your .tex file(s)