Devel::Cover is fast approaching its fifteenth birthday. When it was released the minimum Perl version supported was 5.6.1, and that was because the mechanism Devel::Cover needed was not introduced until 5.6.1.

Since that time, Devel::Cover has supported every new, stable version of Perl, whilst continuing to support every version from 5.6.1. Not every feature is available on every version, but most are.

I have recently pushed a commit which raises the minimum version to 5.8.1. The main reason for this is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to install 5.6.x and 5.8.0 to test against. Other reasons are that Devel::Cover has reduced functionality prior to 5.8.1, and that the official Perl toolchain now has a minimum version of 5.8.1. I'd rather spend my limited time on other aspects of Devel::Cover than supporting perl versions that are well over a decade old.

I doubt very much that anyone is seriously using current versions of Devel::Cover on versions of Perl before 5.8.1, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who might find this new minimum requirement to be troublesome.

Otherwise, I'll plan on releasing Devel::Cover 1.22 with this new requirement in the near future.