I hear your concern about using a deprecated version of graph-tool.
Unfortunately, I found out that nothing on CentOS7 meet the pre-requisite
of graph-tool-2.16, not even the GCC compiler. And after many hours of
reading Linux textbook and browsing the internet, we simply did not manage
to build graph-tool-2.16 from source. And that's why we opted for
graph-tool-2.8 as a far from perfect solution.
I wonder if you have any recommendation or general comments for us non-CS
trained researchers installing graph-tool-2.16 on CentOS7? Much appreciated,
CentOS is not meant as an operating system with the latest packages.
It is rather meant as a stable server operating system.
However, you can install the devtoolset-4 SCL which does provide more
recent packages, see for example https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/devtoolset-4/
At my university, I have Graph-Tool running on a large number of CentOS 7
servers.
For installation, I use the steps as described below this e-mail.