If you load the following as tcz extensions, they will not use much ram and will take care of most compiling situations:
gcc, binutils, base-devs, bison, diffutils, file, findutils, flex, gawk, gperf, grep, m4, make, patch, pkg-config, sed
You may also need the following perl based extensions, but this is less likely:
perl_xml, perl_archive_zip, help2man