building gdb from git

Hi,

When I clone git I get quite a few projects.

What's the simplest way to build only gdb?

My first attempt was to do this:
    ../binutils-gdb/gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
however this failed with a missing bfd.h.

In general, if I only really want to build/modify gdb,
should I attempt to build everything like,
    ../binutils-gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
or should I install the dev packages for everything I'm missing?

Also, why does configure work and let the build fail, rather than
having configure detect the missing header files?

Thanks,
Bob Rossi