What is guaranteed with the new numbering scheme of GCC releases ?

[Toon Moene]

All,

One of my colleagues on the Fortran Standardization Committee asked me 
the following question:

"People are still not too familiar with the new GCC numbering scheme. 
My impression is that 5.2 is just a maintenance update of 5.1.  However, 
they still want assurance that there are no call interface or module 
format changes between 5.1 and 5.2 so that libraries and modules built 
with 5.1 (MPI, for example) will still work with 5.2.  Is that the case?"

I went to https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html#num_scheme for answering that 
question, but it is by far not explicit enough to answer it.

Shouldn't we be documenting the shift in numbering schematics on a far 
more obvious location on our web site, and with more complete semantics ?

Kind regards,

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/; weather: http://moene.org/~hirlam/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortran#news