at this point. Here are tests using latest make (which I believe showActually, I maybe, just maybe, discovered the source of problem. Shame on me, it's my patch -- look in the startup code of mintlib, I changed our premilitary stack to 1 KB, to be sure we know what's going on in case of some problems (ehm, it does work really well ;-). When I changed this stack to 64 KB, libgcc gets compiled/linked. I didn't do further investigation since gcc/binutils (btw I really recommend to do this "merged" chain, i.e. binutils inside gcc) compilation finished just this morning.
make is not at fault):