[Bioperl-l] New Bioperl minimum Perl version -- 5.6.1 or 5.8 ?

[Chris Fields]

Agreed.  There are classes in Bioperl that no longer support versions  
older than 5.6.1 (FTLocationFactory, for instance), so that's the  
minimum.  We could always require 5.6.1 but recommend 5.8 or higher,  
but I can't think of any that absolutely require v. 5.8.  If so, we  
can always follow Hilmar's suggestion.

We also should change the INSTALL and the wiki docs to reflect this.

Chris

On Sep 23, 2006, at 10:48 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

> They may well be. I'd recommend against requiring a version that you
> don't have to require. Much (most) of Bioperl will run just fine in
> 5.6.1. Modules that need Perl 5.8.x and higher should check that (via
> 'use' at compile or 'require' at runtime), and it is easy enough to
> test for the version of perl and exit gracefully in a test script if
> the perl version falls short.
>
> 	-hilmar
>
> On Sep 23, 2006, at 9:09 PM, Torsten Seemann wrote:
>
>>
>>  From a previous thread it was unclear whether it had been decided
>> to move the
>> minimum Perl version for Bioperl to 5.6.1 or 5.8 ?
>>
>> http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?
>> group=gmane.comp.lang.perl.bio.general&article=12304
>>
>> The "INSTALL" file says 5.005, the wiki says "5.6, prefer 5.8",
>> recent MAC OS X
>> users only have 5.6, a lot of modules already need 5.6 anyway, and
>> Sendu says
>> his new pull-parsers need 5.8.
>>
>> My impression was that it was informally decided to require 5.6.1,
>> but there
>> appears to be a good case to move to 5.8 (now 3 years old).
>> Obviously there are
>> still people who are unable to migrate to Perl 5.8 yet, but are
>> they the same
>> users who will be using the latest Bioperl version anyway?
>>
>> -- 
>> Torsten Seemann
>> Victorian Bioinformatics Consortium, Monash University, Australia
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>> Bioperl-l at lists.open-bio.org
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>>
>
> -- 
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:-  hlapp at gmx dot net :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
>
>
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Christopher Fields
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lab of Dr. Robert Switzer
Dept of Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign