The reason I wanted to start with gcc 0.9, a few years ago, was that in
the early days gcc would compile under just about any OS and C compiler
-- the newer gcc's only seem to compile under gcc. So you start with gcc
0.9, get it to build under native plan 9, not APE, then bootstrap your
way forward to current. I have no idea if this will work, but I did
bootstrap gcc onto a lot of weird machines 15 years ago. It looks much
harder, however, to drop gcc 4.0 onto a non-gcc-like C compiler and get
it to go!
If this ever worked, this should still work right, just possibly with several bootstrapped stages to get to that point.
I think the real danger in doing this is getting someone who wants to be a GNU maintainer/defender of the Plan 9 platform. I've no interest to ever look under the hood of the GNU compiler collection personally, but I can see the value in having this available on Plan 9.
