[ensembl-dev] Perl Version Upgrade

[Andy Yates]

Dear all,

In 2013 the Ensembl team spent a significant amount of time upgrading our internal Perl version from 5.8 to 5.14 (totalling a 9 year development gap). This was in part motivated by the improved runtime and memory consumption seen in later versions of Perl especially in the 5.14 development tree. We were also motivated by some new language constructs only available with later versions of Perl (smart match operators, non-destructive regular expressions, defined OR operators).

From release 75 we wish to increase the minimal Perl version for Ensembl from 5.8 to 5.14.

Many OS ship with compatible versions of Perl out of the box; to check what version of Perl you are currently running you should execute the following from your command line (anything with 5.14 or above is great):

$ perl -v
This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 4 (v5.14.4) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level

Should you have any questions or concerns about this move please get in touch ASAP either here on dev or via helpdesk.

All the best,

Andy

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Andrew Yates - Ensembl Support Coordinator
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1SD
Tel: +44-(0)1223-492538
Fax: +44-(0)1223-494468
http://www.ensembl.org/