Installation help (simple)

Installation help (simple)

[Rudy]

Hi,

   I am a very inexperienced Linux user and am having
a hell of a time trying to understand the installation
instructions for GCC.  Apparently I am missing
something, becasue I cannot for the life of me
understand the "configuration" instructions that were
included in the download.
   All I want to do is install GCC in my machine so
that when I make or make install another program, I
have a valid C compiler on my machine. I am not a
power user and just need it to be on the machine.
   Below is the message I get when trying to install
the package.  
   Can anyone help me with this one?  Thanks in
advance....

James

[jef@localhost gcc-4.0.1]$ ./configure
loading cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking target system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for a BSD compatible install...
/usr/bin/install -c
checking whether ln works... yes
checking whether ln -s works... yes
configure: error: Building in the source directory is
not supported in this release. See
http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html for more
details.


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Re: Installation help (simple)

[Brian Dessent]

Rudy wrote:

>    All I want to do is install GCC in my machine so
> that when I make or make install another program, I
> have a valid C compiler on my machine. I am not a
> power user and just need it to be on the machine.

If you do not currently have a C compiler installed there is no way that
you are going to be able to build gcc from source.  Unless you have a
specific reason to compile gcc, you are much better off installing the
packaged version of gcc that your vendor provides.  This is especially
the case for someone that is not sure what he's doing, because there are
many issues to be aware of when building and installing the compiler,
especially if you want it to interact gracefully with other programs
that you already have on your system.

You did not mention what platform or distro you are using, so it makes
helping you much harder.  But it looks like Linux from the output below,
and so you should just install the 'gcc' package, using 'rpm' or
'apt-get' or 'urpmi' or 'yum' or whatever command your system uses to
install a new package.  Note that you will need many other packages in
addition to gcc if you do not have a working development environment, so
you should use whatever tool your distro offers for handling
dependencies.

> configure: error: Building in the source directory is
> not supported in this release. See
> http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html for more
> details.

You can't just run ./configure.  You need to build in a separate
directory from the source.  Go back and re-read the configure.html URL
carefully.  The ninth paragraph ("To configure GCC") gives you a sample
of how you are to run configure.  Note that 'objdir' and 'srcdir' are
not literal words, but they represent the relative paths of two
different directories.

Brian