Building Octave 4.4.1 on Centos 7

[Calvin Dodge]

I have a couple of questions.

The Octave manual says "use a recent compiler".  Is GCC 4.8.5 deemed suitable 
for Octave and packages?  I've built Octave with it, but am having trouble with 
some packages.
For example, the "mpi" package fails.  When I try building it manually, it has 
conflicts with the Octave header files.   Given that the most recent mpi 
package is significantly older than the 4.4.1 release, does this indicate that 
the mpi package hasn't been updated as Octave was, and requires an older 
release, like 3.8.2?

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Calvin Dodge