[ensembl-dev] Perl Version Upgrade

[Andy Yates]

Hi John,

This is a fair point. I would direct those users to install a new version of Perl using perlbrew. We have our blog post from September which details how to perform an installation of Perl on OSX. Whilst this is not aimed at versions of OSX prior to 10.6 [1] the guide should be applicable to most OSX versions. We actually recommend users install their own version of Perl on OSX CPAN module upgrades have sometimes had very serious unintentional side-effects. 

Should a user not feel confident in running Perlbrew then there are alternatives such as fink [2] or homebrew [3] both of which provide rudimentary package management on OSX. I cannot vouch how good these systems are when installing new Perl versions as I've always gone the route of Perlbrew.

Finally there is always the option of using a virtual machine; specifically the Ensembl virtual machine. This works nicely with VirtualBox & provides a useful development environment. We are also looking into a new tool called Vagrant [4] for providing VM setups (both with and without a desktop manager).

Cheers,

Andy

[1] - Indeed some of the instructions refer to the App Store which IIRC did not exist in 10.5
[2] - http://www.finkproject.org/
[3] - http://brew.sh
[2] - http://www.vagrantup.com/

------------
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/

On 8 Jan 2014, at 16:46, John Marshall <jm18 at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:

> On 7 Jan 2014, at 16:14, Andy Yates wrote:
>> 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):
> 
> Notably most versions of Mac OS X do not ship with Perl 5.14 or later.
> 
> A bit of searching suggests that the highest system Perl on Snow Leopard is 5.10.0, on Lion and Mountain Lion it is 5.12.x, and only on Mavericks, with 5.16.2, is there a system Perl version of at least 5.14.
> 
> What advice does Ensembl suggest for people wanting to use the e!75 and later APIs on Mac OS X?
> 
>> $ perl -v
>> This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 4 (v5.14.4) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
> 
> Presumably this is your own Perl, that you have installed yourself via perlbrew or similar.  Some of us can probably do this, but it doesn't seem like an ideal requirement in general...
> 
>    John
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