And the winner is...

[mdlbear]

crosstool

After beating my head against OpenEmbedded's monster build system for a couple of days, Dan Kegel's crosstool appear to be a major win. It's finished with gcc, g++, and glibc, and is now happily compiling gjc.

To be fair, I got this far with the Debian tools; the sticking point there was figuring out how to build the package. That, and the nagging feeling that the target environment might not be quite sufficiently Debian-like.

update: The java compiler and libraries actually got built but as far as I can tell not gij, the interpretor (runtime). I think it's in the same source tree, so it's probably just a configuration option that needs tweaking. Total build time about an hour and a half.