Hi
I do most of my developing - not on Centos, but on SME7. But I don't really have to worry, as my developer SME is "only" a VMWare machine I use for developing. It is in no way productive or connected - unless I need some updates, contribs or devel-stuff, I'll allow it to use NAT.
The whole thing is on my Notebook with a 8 GB Partition. I also have a current copy of this developer" SME on my home PC and my office PC.
If someone hacks your box, he's glad if you've already got all the tools in place to download and compile his rotten stuff: In-LAN Sniffer, IRC-Bots, Spam-Tools or even RootKits.
But I find it helpful, especially Iif I want to integrate a product with SME that I can try it out the way it will be running. Centos doesn't have the same run system as SME with run level 7 and other SME specific stuff...
If you must use a compiler environment like GCC on a productive box, be sure to remove it when you're finished!
Cheers
Andy