Interface changes?

[Tom Cortese]

Hello,

I can see from the recent flurry of activity that many people are working 
very diligently to get the next release of PETSc out of the door in the 
near future, and I will soon be installing this new release on several 
large unclassified machines at several DoD centers, and I am also expected 
to write at least a short blurb telling people how to use it (usually I 
just tellt them what $PETSC_DIR should be set to, and provide a 
description of several $PETSC_ARCH configurations, such as debugging or 
optimized, that I create for them).

While I can certainly wait for the release notes, I was wondering if the 
new PETSc contains actual interface changes (i.e., existing software that 
calls PETSc routines will not compile since some functions no longer 
exist, or they still exist but have a different number/type of arguments), 
or if the new release provides new 
functionality/stability/performance/bugfixes/routines/whatever but can 
still be linked with older code.

Thanks,

 	-Tom Cortese
 	PET Computational Environment Onsite