Newbie questions (where's the FAQ)

[boggler <fklotz at cisco dot com>]

I'm kinda new to this whole GNU thing, so I need to figure out how to do some
basic things.
I'm very interested in using the gold linker to link some large executables.

I downloaded the binutils-2.19.1 package last week (Feb 24), unpacked it,
ran configure and make and make install, and now I can indeed run gold; but
there are issues.

Questions:

1.  Is there a FAQ?  Where is it?

Hopefully someone will point me to  a FAQ that answers at least some of  my
remaining questions, but I will list them here anyway, in case they aren't
in the FAQ.  

2.  I need a patch that is described in the forum, but it was not included
in the download (that is, the gold I built behaves in a way that indicates
the patch is not there).  In fact, the file that the patch modifies was not
included in the download.  So how do I apply the patch, or get a download
with the patch in it?  Is there a .bleeding download, or some such, with all
patches applied?

3.  I believe I will eventually want to make changes to the linker, at least
for my own use (and to offer back to the community, if they want them).  I
was able to do the anonymous CVS to download the full binutils source; but I
don't know how to build gold from that.  If I could do that, I could
probably apply patches.

4.  The README file for gold is a reasonable 50,000-foot overview of what it
does, but it would also be very helpful to have a 10,000, or even 5000-foot
view, describing the passes the linker performs and what it does in each
pass, plus an overview of the data structures used, and ELF layout of the
output files produced.  Does that exist?  If so, where?

5.  I am especially interested in incremental linking, both as described in
some messages on the forum (existing executable plus new/replacement .o
files, to create a new executable quickly), AND something else that I think
of as incremental linking, but which may need a different name to avoid
confusion - namely, pre-linking together significant chunks of object code,
so that the final link only deals with a few large chunks, with minimal
cross-connections, rather than 50,000+ separate object files with hundreds
of thousands (if not millions) of references to resolve.  I would be
interested in hearing from people who are working on, or have a special
interest in, either of these concepts.
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