This should be fairly obvious, but the basic document describing a tree of GNU software is the GNU Coding Standards (`standards.texi').
Cygnus maintains an additional standard Makefile target:
In addition to this additional target, the optional targets `check' and `installcheck' are required for every package in the tree.
Since many components of the tree use 'autoconf' generated configure scripts, you must configure the tree on the host that you wish to configure for.
A corollary to this is that you also need to have a C compiler available at configure time. `cc' is used, unless you specify another compiler by setting the environment variable CC during the configuration. The scripts and Makefiles used to build Cygnus releases do something like this:
CC='cc -Xs' ../progressive/configure sparc-sun-solaris2 etc
You are likely to run into problems if you configure with a different compiler than you use during build time. For example, if you configure using `gcc', and compile with `cc' on SunOS 4.x, you'll have problems with programs that expect `const' to be useful and valid, since this feature is tested for at configure time.