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gccg++redhatyumrhel
Jay Elrod
Jay Elrod

Reputation: 738

GCC backwards compatibility

I am porting an application to a red hat enterprise 5 server, and the server has GCC v4.1.2 installed. I need GCC 4.2, and 4.1.2 is the newest version in the yum network. If I download a newer .repo file and run yum install to update it, is there any chance that the install would cause dependency failures with older applications running on the server? I don't feel like it would, but I'm not positive, and this is my first time working on a live server and I don't want to mess anything up. Is it safe to just go for it?

Thanks for the advice!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1824

Answers (1)

Jonathan Wakely
Jonathan Wakely

Reputation: 171433

The runtime libraries from GCC 4.2 are backward compatible with those from GCC 4.1, so anything linked to the older libraries should work fine with the newer libraries.

That said, there may be RPM packages with dependencies on the specific 4.1.2 version which would complain, even if technically they would work with the newer libraries. And of course if you screw something up it's your own fault ;-)

I don't think there's anything newer than GCC 4.1.2 available for RHEL5 anyway

Upvotes: 2

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