[texhax] new installation: biber broken

[Haines Brown]

I was fumbling about trying to customize biblatex-ieee and managed to
break TexLive 2014, and so I put it aside and installed TexLive 2015
(install-tl-20150930).

With TexLive 2015, biber generates an empty .bbl file. I created a
little test file, "test.tex":

  \documentclass[12pt]{article}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % 
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} %
  \usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex-chicago}
    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/nat-sci.bib}
    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/history.bib}
    \addbibresource{/home/haines/jabref/soc-sci.bib}
  \begin{document}
    citation: (\cite{Barrett2007}).
    citation: (\cite{Deacon2008}).
    citation: (\cite{Paulus2003}).
  \printbibliography
  \end{document}

Running pdflatex on it produces no errors but of course warns that three
citations are yet undefined.  The .bcf file sees the citations.

I do $ biber --debug test.bcf and get

  INFO - This is Biber 2.1
  INFO - Logfile is 'test.blg'
  INFO - Reading 'test.bcf'
  INFO - Found 3 citekeys in bib section 0
  INFO - Processing section 0
  INFO - Looking for bibtex format file \
    '/home/haines/jabref/nat-sci.bib' for section 0 
  INFO - Decoding LaTeX character macros into UTF-8

  TeX Output exited abnormally with code 1 at Fri Oct  2 08:46:36

The resulting .bbl file is empty and the PDF does not list any
References.

I played with the add bibresource statements and it seems that if
nat-sci.bib comes first, it exits with it, otherwise it exits at the
second bibresource, regardless of their order and number. It seems that
biber exits prematurely for reasons independent of the databases and
citations.