Re: gcc from sdk repository: You must have had a really full rootfs at the time. The situation is better on the N900 now - we have more optified programs, even in devel, so it's easier to keep rootfs space down.

Anyway, gcc won't by itself take up too much space (relatively speaking...) - it's all the -dev packages that'll rape your rootfs. Currently, I manually optify all these packages right after I install them, and as of this last reflash I got annoyed and started saving the optifications in a script to run to do it automatically next time. But yes, sometimes you need a decently large handful of MB to fit all the stuff into rootfs before you can optify it yourself.