J. David Bryan wrote:
What I thought you were asserting was that there was some fundamental requirement that (for example) GPC based on gcc-2.95.3 would only work properly if gcc-2.95.3 was also installed due to some inherent dependencies in the tools themselves and not merely due to where they are located. As far as I understand, there are no such dependencies.
As far as I know, it's not guaranteed that there are no such dependencies. E.g., things in libgcc.a might change. This can also depend on the platform (e.g., on Linux there seem to be few such problems, at least unless pre-ELF files are involved ;-). I've heard that C++ is more sensible to such issues (e.g., the recent DJGPP announcement said: "Also please DON'T mix C++ libraries (or object files) built with different compiler versions. C++ sources should be recompiled (seems that there is no need to do this for C sources).").
But then, I've done a joint Pascal/C++ project some years ago, using a GPC based on 2.8.1 and a g++ version of egcs-2.91.whatever, and a GMP library compiled by whatever C compiler (maybe not even gcc, but the system compiler), and all that on Solaris, and it worked ...
Frank