The installation instructions in the manual are somewhat outdated (and have always been, at least for some years now). There are probably a number of things which are not quite accurate, missing or unnecessary (perhaps kludges that were once necessary). Also, the structure of the chapter is probably not optimal.
Furthermore, there's information (partly overlapping, but also containing things not mentioned in the manual) that was once in the FAQ, but was taken out since it should be merged with the install instructions (because having two parallel, but not quite identical instructions would only add to the confusion).
This merging hasn't been done, so the old FAQ information has rotted since then (probably all URLs in it are wrong now etc.), so it must be carefully updated and then merged with the install chapter.
Obviously, I'm looking for people to do that. (I'm not going to, since my perspective, especially here, is a bit different from the average user's ...)
Ideally, perhaps for each "essentially" different platform (i.e., DJGPP, Cygwin, Mingw, Mac OS, Unix and perhaps GNU/Linux as a special case of Unix where some things are easier, so it might be worth making it a separate section which doesn't confuse the user with details necessary for other Unices) one user should write one compact section. It should describe both compiling from sources and installing binaries. (Of course, this doesn't mean completely rewriting it -- the existing material can be used and rearranged, of course.)
There should be some coordination (by one of them or someone else), so the sections will not look more different from each other than necessary, and common things need to be described only once. I'd like to not have to do this myself, but instead get the collected material from the coordinator in a new install.texi when it's ready.
(I'm sending this mail to both gpc and gpc-doc, since it concerns the documentation, but also "regular" GPC users, and since the archives currently don't work, please reply to both lists. Once the volunteers have found, they can coordinate via gpc-doc only or private mail, of course ...)
I've put the install chapter from the current sources as well as the old information from the FAQ at http://fjf.gnu.de/gpc-install.tar.gz
Frank