configure: error: cannot compute suffix of object files: cannot compile

[Timur Tabi]

I'm building gcc 4.3.3 on Mac OS X 10.5.  binutils seems to build
fine, but gcc itself fails with this error:

checking whether ln -s works... yes
checking for powerpc-linux-gcc...
/Volumes/Goliath/Users/timur/dev/gcc-bin/./gcc/xgcc
-B/Volumes/Goliath/Users/timur/dev/gcc-bin/./gcc/
-B/usr/local/powerpc-linux/bin/ -B/usr/local/powerpc-linux/lib/
-isystem /usr/local/powerpc-linux/include -isystem
/usr/local/powerpc-linux/sys-include
checking for suffix of object files... configure: error: cannot
compute suffix of object files: cannot compile
See `config.log' for more details.
make[1]: *** [configure-target-libgcc] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

A Google search of this error message shows several people with this
problem, mostly on Solaris, but no real solution.

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux kernel developer at Freescale