Basic Installation help

[Bill Moseley <moseley at hank dot org>]

I'm slightly confused by the web pages that describe installation.

I'm upgrading a SuSE distributed gcc:
> gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-linux/egcs-2.91.66/specs
gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)

I downloaded 3.0 full (17921956 gcc-3.0.tar.gz).

1) If I only want to replace my current gcc, can I just install C anc C++
compilers or is the "full" package the way to go?  I only expect to build C
and C++ programs at this time.

2) The install page at http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/install/configure.html
says:

  "we highly recommend that GCC be built into a separate directory than the
   sources which does not reside within the source tree"

Ok, then it gives this:

     % mkdir objdir 
     % cd objdir 
     % srcdir/configure [target] [options] 

Which makes srcdir a sub directory of objdir.  I believe it doesn't matter,
but:

Is "srcdir" really something like "<srcdir>" to be replace by where ever
gcc was untarred?  Or does it really mean to untar the source as a sub
directory of 
the build directory?

In other words, is this what is implied, or does it not matter where the
srcdir is located?

   % mkdir objdir
   % cd objdir
   % lwp-download ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/...../gcc-3.0.tar.gz
   % tar zxof gcc-3.0.tar.gz
   % gcc-3.0/configure
   % make bootstrap
   % su root
   $ make install


3) I get a large number of warnings when building.  I find this a bit
disconcerting.  I guess I'd expect the compiler source to not generate
warnings...  Anyway, is this expected?

4) Finally, I assume my current binutils are fine to use with 3.0.  Is
there anything else I need to update, such as libraries?  Some of this is a
bit overwhelming for a simple weekend programmer.

Thanks,

Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org