Compiling with an arbitrary distribution can actually be done, if there is enough disk space [7]. The steps are these:
Install Debian 2.1 Slink onto a different partition (or even another system entirely) — including all C compilers, libraries, headers, kernel source, et al as needed for development. Slink could probably be installed into about 400M or 500M of disk space — in today's environment of 10G disks and bigger, this is probably not a big problem.
Reboot into the prefered distribution (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, etc.).
Mount the Debian partition under a selected mount point (perhaps /debian). Note that this does not require the disk to be on the same physical system; it could be mounted via NFS.
Perform a chroot to do the compiling — this makes the Debian environment the operating environment for that shell. It may be necessary to also mount the /proc filesystem to /debian/proc — /however, it is not necessary to operate in the Debian environment, only to compile in it. Note too that /proc can be mounted multiple times — so this is not a problem.
Some interesting things to note in particular:
A standalone running Debian system could be mounted via NFS onto another system.
Remember to mount /proc if all operations will be done in the Debian enviroment.
Scripts could be written to force utilities such as make, gcc, or configure to run in a chroot-ed environment.
The Debian gcc compiler that is provided with the Debian Slink system reportedly may have bugs which result in binaries that produce Segmentation Violations.