provider-man | service provider manager for Laravel projects | Build Tool library

Are the ProviderManifests used by EntityFramework backwards compatible, in particular for Oracle and SQL Server?

I'm creating an instance of the DbProviderInfo class to pass to DbModel.Build(). The second argument to the constructor is the ProviderManifestToken.

As the documentation says, the ProviderManifestToken is:

A string that identifies that version of the database server being used. For example, the SQL Server provider uses the string "2008" for SQL Server 2008. This cannot be null but may be empty.

There is a related, unanswered question here asking what ProviderManifestInfo does. From reading this page I understand that it allows the database provider to determine which version of the ProviderManifest to return, without using a database connection. (What the ProviderManifest does is also explained at that last link.)

Experimentally, I have found that I can use an Oracle 12 database with a ProviderManifestToken of "11.2" with no problems. But is this supposed to be true in general? For example, if I pass "2008" as the ProviderManifestToken and I am using SQL Server 2012, can I expect 'things' to work OK?

I have been unable to find any documentation on this point and I would not be surprised if things are different from provider to provider.