[COLUG] A perplexing problem

[Robb Bossley]

I have been messing around with uml, as well as toying with the idea of making my own "distro", simply for the learning experience - yes, I am pretty crazy.  My understanding is that most of the main utilities can be compiled from source on an already existing system, and some type of flag can be given during the compile process to cause the compiler to understand that the target "system" is a mounted filesystem other than the one currently being used.  Is this true?  If so, is this a somewhat standard flag?  How would it normally be invoked?  It seems that doing this type of build from source process is like the chicken and the egg - one cannot compile unless one has the make, gcc, glibc, etc, but one must compile these to have them.

Any help is appreciated.

Robb