I got through clean with prefix launcher install.  To back up just a second, the previous failures while compiling charset.c were very odd.  There was no core or error messages except "internal error".  As I mentioned, when I tried it a 2nd time, it repeated.  When I tried doing the compile by hand, outside the prefix-launcher environment, it worked.  Very odd.

I effectively redid what I did before with a couple changes:

1) I did ulimit -S -d unlimited (but I have not yet change ncargs)
2) I had a LIBPATH set before but that should not have changed anything.  I unset it in the last pass
3) Moved the place of the source and destination to a shorter pathname.

I used the same gcc 4.5.0 compiler as before.  As I said, I've made it through the prefix-launcher install.  My guess is that the ulimit avoided the charset.c issue.  And the shorter pathnames avoided the arg limit issue which would also be avoided with setting ncargs.

Perhaps add a little comment about ulimit and ncargs in your wiki page.

I'm going to continue onward...