What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install?

What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install?

[rkarthi2k5]

Hi Sir/Mam,

            I installed the gcc and  other softwares wlth .tar extension. We
have to do a step by step procedure while installing the  sofware which have
.tar extension. 

             1) First, we have to unzip the file and give ./configure 
             2) Second, we have to give make
 	     3) Third, we logon to root and give make install.

           My question is, why we are doing the above steps sequentially and
what is actually happend at the each and every steps(configure,make,make
install). What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install? I request
u to give elloborate explanation, because i m new to Linux. Waiting for ur
valuable reply.


Thanks and Regards,
Karthikeyan.R
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Re: What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install?

[Andrew Haley]

rkarthi2k5 wrote:

>             I installed the gcc and  other softwares wlth .tar extension. We
> have to do a step by step procedure while installing the  sofware which have
> .tar extension. 
> 
>              1) First, we have to unzip the file and give ./configure 
>              2) Second, we have to give make
>  	     3) Third, we logon to root and give make install.

gcc is written for lots of different types of computer.  The configure
step customizes the build for the computer that you're using.

The rest is pretty obvious, I would have thought: make actually
compiles gcc, and make install installs it where you need it to
be.  You don't want to install gcc until you've built and tested
it.

Andrew.

Re: What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install?

[John (Eljay) Love-Jensen]

Hi Karthikeyan,

> 1) First, we have to unzip the [tar] file...

Okay, that's good.  You will probably also need to unzip the GMP and MPFR.

Also, make sure you've already installed all the other prerequisite tools.

http://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html

> ... and give ./configure

Unlike almost all other packages, GCC is *NOT* configured quite that way,
since you should not configure GCC in the same directory as the GCC source
which you've extracted from the tar.  As per the documentation...

http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html

For almost all other packages (other than GCC), ./configure is very common.

> 2) Second, we have to give make

Good.  Make sure you use GNU make, as per the prerequisites.

> 3) Third, we logon to root and give make install.

Good.

> My question is, why we are doing the above steps sequentially and
> what is actually happend at the each and every steps(configure,make,make
> install). What is the objective of Configure, Make, Make Install? I request
> u to give elloborate explanation, because i m new to Linux. Waiting for ur
> valuable reply.

You are doing the steps sequentially because if you do them out of order,
then the dependency of the later steps upon the completion of the first
steps will cause that out-of-order step to fail.

The configure step analyzes your platform, and sets parameters for the
build, and constructs a makefile tailored to your platform.

The make step, for GCC, runs a multi-pass build of GCC.  (Note that you need
to have a compiler installed to build GCC.  A chicken-and-egg problem.
That's one of the prerequisites listed in the prerequisites.html.)

The make install step puts the built executable and other support files
(such as man pages) into the location form which they are intended to run on
your platform.

HTH,
--Eljay