Best way of compiling applications to run on older linux distros

[Tom Quarendon <tom dot quarendon at teamwpc dot co dot uk>]

We have a requirement for our application to run on Centos 4, but 
currently we compile on Fedora 9 with gcc 4.3.
My question is what is the best way of compiling an application to 
target older linux distros? Doesn't seem to be any common wisdom that I 
can find on the web, but maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing.

I had tried just compiling up with gcc 4.3 and bundling the executables 
and libraries, including libstdc++ (code is written in C++), but ran in 
to the problem of the dynamic linker hash format having changed. So I 
recompiled with the --hash-format=sysv linker option, but the 
libstdc++.so is still compiled in the incompatible way, and without 
shipping libstdc++.so I get complaints about incorrect levels of 
libstdc++ (expecting 3.4.9 I think, but only found 3.4.6).

Obvisously one solution is to compile on Centos 4, using a gcc such as 3.4.
However I'd like to use the latest gcc is I can. Indeed I'm having 
trouble getting some of our code to link when I compile it with gcc 3.4 
installed on the Fedora 9 build machine. I'm assuming that latest gcc 
will produce better results. It certainly compiles much faster.

So what's the "correct" way to do this? If I'm a company producing 
commercial applications that I'd like to run on as wide a variety of 
common Linux installations as possible, what's my best build 
platform/tool chain?

Thanks.

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