make cross - should it work?

[Neal Becker <neal at ctd dot comsat dot com>]

I'm still battling with make cross.  I'm trying to build with host
hppa1.1-hpux9.05 target m68k-unknown-coff.

I did

CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash /bin/bash ../../egcs-1.0/configure
--target=m68k-unknown-coff --prefix=/usr/local/m68k -v
PATH=/usr/local/m68k/bin:$PATH make cross

make cross built gcc and friends OK.  Then it tries to make libraries.

It dies building libiberty (for the target, not the host).  

First question: is it *supposed* to succeed building libiberty, libio, 
libstdc++ for an embedded system with no os? (I'm currently using
gcc-2.7.2 + newlib-1.8).

It's not succeeding because it does:

/src/m68k/egcs-1.0/gcc/xgcc -B/src/m68k/egcs-1.0/gcc/ -c -g -O2 -I. -I../../../../egcs-1.0/libiberty/../include  ../../../../egcs-1.0/libiberty/dummy.c 2>/dev/null
(/src/m68k/egcs-1.0/gcc/xgcc -B/src/m68k/egcs-1.0/gcc/ -o dummy -g -O2   dummy.o  ) >errors 2>&1 || true

well we forgot to put -I/usr/local/m68k/m68k-unknown-coff/include, and 
similarly -L, so of course all the functions that would be provided by 
newlib aren't found, and the wrong headers are used.

Stranger still we see this bit being executed:

if [ -f ../newlib/Makefile ]; then \
  echo "#define NEED_sys_nerr 1" >xconfig.h; \
  echo "#define NEED_sys_errlist 1" >>xconfig.h; \
  echo "#define NEED_sys_siglist 1" >>xconfig.h; \
  echo "#define NEED_strsignal 1" >>xconfig.h; \
  echo "#define NEED_psignal 1" >>xconfig.h; \
else \

So if I had put newlib under builddir/libraries maybe this would work?
What is this doing here?  Doesn't appear to be documented.