I'm still bit of a newbie so please bear with me.

I have RH7.0 installed. Based on the most recent CERT advisories I really want to upgrade my sendmail. Since RH 7.0 is no longer supported I'm on my own.

I have rolled my own kernel, which seems a lot easier than compiling sendmail from scratch (imagine that). I gave build sendmail a try and had a bunch of problems. I am still working on that angle.

What I also tried to do is install a more recent version of sendmail as a RPM from Redhat. What I've discovered is that it has a bunch of dependencies on shared libraries that I don't have or the ones I have are older ones. I can certainly install/update these, but I was wondering, if I do that do I break something else on my system? Or do shared libraries get called by their version number? Or are, shared libraries, usually backwards compatible?

Any thoughts? Places I can learn more?

Thanks.
-mark

"Or are, shared libraries, usually backwards compatible?"

Yes. When they are not they are usually given slightly different names such as gnome2 instead of gnome.

"if I do that do I break something else on my system? "

Probably not, but you might get into dependencies hell.

"Or do shared libraries get called by their version number?"

This varies with the program that calls the shared library routines. Some do and some do not.