libgcc_s.so on RHEL 5 & 6

Question

I am developing an application which depends on libgcc_s.so and is to be installed on RHEL 5 & 6. I am trying to figure out what would be better: distribute application with libgcc_s which will require 2 different setups, one for each RHEL version or to rely on system installed libgcc_s.

• is libgcc_s.so distributed by default with rhel 5? if so under what packages?.
• are there packages that only contain gcc run-time libraries (including libgcc_s.so) but without gcc itself? since i suspect some customers may want to avoid installing gcc for security reasons.

Answer 1

Here (closely related Fedora 18), /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 is part of package libgcc, which is described as "This package contains GCC shared support library which is needed e.g. for exception handling support.". It should be safe to install (and probably is installed already, if any C++ code is deployed).

(the above courtesy of locate(1), and a bit of rpm -qif ...)