crosstool vs. building from scratch

[Trevor Harmon <trevor at vocaro dot com>]

I am reading Karim Yaghmour's book, "Building Embedded Linux  
Systems," and in Chapter 4 he goes into great detail about building a  
cross-compiling GCC toolchain from scratch. He describes how to  
download and compile GCC, binutils, and kernel headers in separate  
steps.

In the same year of the book's publication, a set of scripts and  
templates called crosstool [1] was released. It automates the entire  
process of Yaghmour's Chapter 4 down to a single command (more or  
less). I have used crosstool successfully for building PowerPC  
executables on an x86 host.

Because I'm new to cross-compiling, I'm curious about the differences  
between these two techniques. I've never tried the from-scratch  
method, but my assumption is that as long as crosstool can build the  
toolchain successfully, then there's no reason to do anything from  
scratch.

Is this assumption correct, or are there developers who can use  
crosstool but still prefer the from-scratch method (for more  
flexibility, for instance)? In other words, if crosstool is working  
for me, is there any situation where I would still want to build the  
toolchain from scratch?

Thanks,

Trevor

[1] http://kegel.com/crosstool/

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