Thanks:)
Okay, so TC doesn't rebuild every package for every release, it just relies on its - apparently really good - backwards compatibility and reuses old packages until they get replaced?
Looking at
http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/x86/tcz/src/abiword/compile_abiword - that doesn't look like a machine-readable build spec; is that a build spec, a log, or notes from a human manually building a package file?