Building libgcj outside of GCC tree?

[Colin Fleming]

Hi all,

I've been corresponding with Joel Dice of ulibgcj fame about various
ways that ulibgcj could be made more efficient and/or easier to
maintain going forward. One thing that would be really useful for
anyone making a custom runtime would be to build libgcj independently
from GCC so it's not required to patch and build the whole tree. Is
this possible? A while ago I tried building gcj with the
--disable-libgcj flag, as I recall when I tried to compile bytecode to
object code it complained about a missing spec file.

Ideally I'd like to be able to compile a version of GCJ without
libgcj, compile libgcj independently, and then pass all the resulting
classes, headers spec files and native libraries explicitly when I
compile my applications. Should this be possible? Is there anything I
need to look out for? I guess I'll also have to build libgc at the
same time.

Thanks for any advice,
Colin