pre-build advice

[karipid@mae.cornell.edu (Daniel Karipides)]

I'm looking for a little advice before I build the latest snapshot
of egcs.  I'm worried that a little of the information in the FAQ
and other places may be a little out of date, so I thought I would
ask here.

I will be building egcs on three system types:

- Pentium II, 300Mz, running Linux RedHat 5.0 (not sure what the
  config.guess will be here...)
- mips-sgi-irix5.3
- mips-sgi-irix6.2

My questions:

(1) For linux, I plan to use glibc 2.0.6 ... is this what people
    would recommend?

(2) Also for linux, what version of binutils should I use?  I've
    seen people recommend 2.8.1.0.23 and 2.9.  Does the 2.9 version
    work with glibc2?  Or should I use 2.8.1.0.23 that H.J. Lu
    mentioned in a previous message?

(3) For the SGI's, would people recommend using gas for 5.3?  I know
    that gas _should not_ be used for 6.2.  I assume I should get
    the latest binutils (2.9) so that I have ranlib.

(4) Given that gdb-4.1.7 is out, is there any reasons not to use
    DWARF2 debugging information; i.e., configure with the --with-stabs
    option, for example?

and perhaps an ignorant question:

(5) If I build glibc2, binutils, etc with an old version of cc (on SGI)
    or gcc (on linux), do I need to rebuild them once I get egcs
    compiled?  Explicitly, do I have to:

    -build binutils, etc with old compiler
    -build egcs
    -build binutils, etc with egcs
    -build egcs using egcs built with the new binutils, etc.

   I can't see what this would do for me, but I want to be sure.

Thanks in advance,

-Dan
----
karipid@mae.cornell.edu