upgrading programs with RPM
 

i'm trying to upgrade some programs on my RedHat 7.3 system using rpm packages, but am having a problem with failed dependencies.
when trying to upgrade to libpng-1.2.2.8, there are hundreds of programs that depend on the currently installed version(1.0.12). In theory I guess I could upgrade all these programs, but I'm wondering if there is a way a way of getting rpm to upgrade libpng (or any other package) without breaking other applications that depend on the current version.
The documentation on www.rpm.org/max-rpm doesn't seem to cover this (at least not as far as I can tell).

Have you tried updating it with apt-rpm or Red Carpet?

# Redhat links
Red Hat Linux Manuals
Maximum RPM
rpmfind
Easier software management: APT-RPM - Red Carpet

# Redhat 8.0 configuration commands
Configure soundcard:
redhat-config-soundcard
Configure X server:
redhat-config-xfree86

When I do an "rpm -qa | grep libpng", it returns:

libpng-1.0.12-2
libpng-1.2.2-6

So it looks like they can coexist. I also looked at the files in each package (rpm -ql libpng-1.0.12-2) and the only file that is the same is the man page.

Speck