Here is the commit where it is explicitely removed:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/texlive-bin&id=01c0f84137a071b298c5c62ae1e4b85dfd586b7a

The commit message notes that biber is provided as a proper package. I expect this will happen shortly?
According to https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/49797 the package name is "biber".

This is also the case. The reason that you/we cannot find it, is that it is in community-testing.

Please expedite the movement of the biber package from community-testing into community and coordinate the package upgrades next time.
I'm writing an important doc that requires biber and I can't use bibtex, because bibtex doesn't print all the fields in a .bib file.

This mistake really f*cked me up today.

As a temporary workaround, I installed a local copy of biber (2.5) and the related biblatex version (should be used in conjunction with biblatex 3.4) in my user $HOME. But we could also enable the testing repositories in /etc/pacman.conf, as biber has been packaged in the community one alongside with it's multiple perl dependencies.

The mail is here : https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2016-June/028094.html Biber package is waiting here : https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community-testing/any/biber/

But as I wanted to go fast and continue working, here's my how-to :

* biber 2.5 binary is available here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/current/binaries/Linux/
* biblatex 3.4 package is available here https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex/files/biblatex-3.4/biblatex-3.4.tds.tgz

Extract the biber tarball made for your arch (32 or 64à, there's a precompiled biber binary inside. I've extracted it in $HOME/.local/bin but anywhere in your $PATH should be fine. Here's the bit of profile you can put in your bash / zsh / profile, whatsover.

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi

Extract the bibtex, doc and tex directories from the biblatex tarball inside $HOME/texmf. Then create the ls-R database for the newly installed version with a mktexlsr $HOME/texmf from your terminal.

Hope this can help you as it saved my day too :)

Wow, that is way, way over-complicating things. How about just installing the package after downloading it?

Was it not possible to wait for the biber package to be ready *before* stripping it from texlive-bin? This fucked up my day too, need to work on a paper and don't have much time left : s
Please fix this ASAP!

I was using texlive* packages from testing with no problems (needed a newer biber for my .bib), when this one got update and biber went missing, installing biber from testing fixed it. Others could downgrade to the previous texlive-bin version they had installed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_packages#Return_to_an_earlier_package_version

Doug : it's less overcomplicating for me than enabling the testing repositories and be sure all dependencies are met and/or having time to debug if something is going wrong. I'm writing an important work, my temporary solution just works.

Rodrigo : I tried to downgrade it, but it seems to be complaining about leftovers from libsynctex its split package.

Downgrading actually works just fine, if you downgrade those packages: poppler poppler-qt5 poppler-glib texlive-bin libsynctex
Biber and the other tools are then downgraded to working versions.

Hello Noel, the biber package is not going into [community] until texlive 2016 moves to [extra].
This is precisely coordination of updates.

Please follow instructions on the wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/official_repositories#testing

"If you enable testing, you must also enable community-testing."

Also remember that [testing] is meant to test packages.

Just install the biber package. It was available at the same time texlive-bin was updated to remove the biber binary blob.
There is nothing complicated here.

Rémy, texlive 2016 moved into extra yesterday. That's why we're here complaining.

But texlive-bin 2016 has been moved to [extra] while biber is still in [community-testing].

I think it was mistakenly done (not by me) following an independent library rebuild.

I'll check whether to revert this or move all of TexLive 2016 into [extra] right now.

This is indeed a big mess, sorry for the inconvenience.

FWIW I've been using most of texlive 2016 from testing (manually downloaded and installed) successfully for a while now (writing my PhD dissertation) without any issues.

Thanks for all the good work!

Packages are now all moved to [extra]