GENDIST is a developer's tool! You should know what you do and why you do it. The makefiles generated by GENDIST do a lot of mounting, formatting, liloing and so on, so there is a danger of corrupting your development system, especially if you modify the generated makefiles. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
The makefiles generated by GENDIST use a number of development tools (e.g. strings, objcopy, ldd etc.), but nothing extraordinary not found in any of the major distributions.
Also, a number of operations (e.g. mounting and formatting) require you to be root.