absolutely.  that was all in my mind as i wrote that message.
also in my mind was that a few years ago,
i spent a miserable time finding all
the cross-portability problems in gcc cross-compiling
from (i think) a little endian processor to a big endian processor,
using gnu assembler and linker in a combination
that wasn't originally provided by ./configure (and
with good reason, it didn't work).  it was awful.  pages of filth.
and those directory structures!
bleah.
perhaps it's better now, but i somewhat cynically doubt it.