It's well known that glibc (and, as far as I know, glibstd++ also) uses symbol versioning mechanism. (For the details refer: How can I link to a specific glibc version.)
The question is how to determine exact versions of GLIBC and GLIBCXX will be chosen by linker for names from libc and libstdc++? For example, how to get something like this:
time -> time@GLIBC_2_5
...
gethostbyname -> gethostbyname@GLIBC_2_3
Why do we need this? It seems to me that it can be useful if you want to minimize required versions of glibc/libstdc++.