Comment 4 for bug 1360404

relying on the version output is not recommended. There are hardly any distro builds of GCC shipping releases, but instead using the FSF branches or vendor branches. So when using a branch you'll see 4.7.1 already shortly after the 4.7.0 release. Then just looking at the version will result in a wrong check on your part. Ubuntu only bumps the version when the point release is made. This is more conservative and avoids checking for things that are not yet there, but doesn't help for feature checking. If you rely on features for branches, don't use version checks but feature checks instead.

I'll change that for 4.9, but not for released versions.