[Bioperl-l] dependencies on perl version

[Fields, Christopher J]

On Feb 5, 2013, at 10:11 PM, Leon Timmermans <l.m.timmermans at students.uu.nl> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 4:32 AM, Hilmar Lapp <hlapp at drycafe.net> wrote:
>> Does anyone know what Ubuntu uses?
> 
> 5.14.2, distrowatch is your friend ;-)
> 
>> I've heard lots of other old version problems with CentOS.
> 
> I know people who still use CentOS 4 in production :-|
> 
>> 8 years is really old, and at some point I fear that weighing backwards compatibility too much just holds us back in a real detrimental way.
> 
> CentOS 5 is 6 years old (and will be supported another 4), but CentOS
> 6 is 'only' 19 months. perl missing a release in the 5.8-5.10
> timeframe combined with an unfortunate alignment of its release
> schedule with Red Hat's don't do us any favors here.
> 
> Leon

Right, it took ~8 yrs to go from 5.8 to 5.10.  I'd like to point out that Python users are in the same boat: the Python version for CentOS 5 is 2.4.3, and Biopython requires a minimum of python 2.5 (and recommends python 2.7).  

We can always state that perl 5.8 is supported for the upcoming Bioperl release, but we're dropping v5.8 support for any future releases.

chris