Since I got my N900 roughly one month ago I had pretty little time to seriously play with it. But my first uncertain steps were hampered by the sad fact that, once gcc, cpp, ld, libc and friends were installed, I had no more space to install anything else in the scarce root partition of the device. The whole development environment should be optified.
I now returned to http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fre...free/g/gcc-4.2 to have a look, but no new version has appeared there since last November.
Comfortable compiler usage is possibly the first element towards effective development efforts. Where should I knock/whine to foster this progress for mankind?

Compiler is not meant to be run on the device so chances of optification is zero or less. what you can do instead is to copy system to big partition on microsd card and boot form it. You will have plenty of space and also better recovery possibilities when you try crazy stuff like replacing busybox with real tools.

Another option is running it through a chrooted environment. There are a couple of threads on compiling/programming on the device itself.

Why?!? Certainly the compiler is not blindingly fast, but it is quite satisfactory (faster than the fortran compiler of my early days, that's for sure).

I certainly can set up the complete development environment in my ext-3-formatted microsd card (in part I did it already), but I did not want to break all connections with the official development environment. I am stunned at this reply. I would have preferred to read that optification of the development tools is delayed due to lack of time, or resources. The first thing I did when I got my N900 was to load the compiler and tools, and I was REALLY disppointed when I found that available space on the main partition dropped to less than 10%.

I think that the possibility to develop phone applications on the phone itself can be a strong selling point, and it should be officially encouraged.

Because that repository, known as the SDK Repository, is for the SDK; not the device.

in other words, fluiodo, it's not that you are not meant to run a compiler on the N900 and use the device itself as your environment for development. - it's that this particular package is meant to run as part of the SDK and therefore shouldn't be subject to changes that aren't needed there.

i do agree with you that it would be very cool to have all these tools optified in extras. but that would be different packages then.

so can someone optify the sdk tools and upload to the repository?

One would think someone would get around to doing this by now... I've been manually optifying after installing the compiler and relevant development libs since I started putting the sdk tools on my N900. It's only a couple of minutes of work but it's a pain for sure.

I totally agree.

I have full support for compiling apps on my N900. I have qmake, make and cmake, all working just fine. I also have gcc and g++. So far, I've managed to compile Fotowall and a couple more apps made in Qt.
This was done in a chroot, where the rootfs has grown to blazing 1Gb because of depencies. In short: do not try to take on the task of optifying all those *-dev packages, it's madness, and will most likely brick your N900 due to un-optified packages. Keep them compilers in chroots. (There's nothing bad with a chroot. They can even interact with the X server and create windows, if you make the correct one. I built one off of a clean image of Maemo 5.)
Chroots FTW!