What does "./configure; make; make install" do?
./configure
tells you whether are quite ready to build the application. It will check if you have everything needed to build the application, and, if it sees any critical errors it will inform you.
make
builds (compiles) the source code. Compiler compiles the code, but, most of the times, the code cannot stand alone, it requires external libraries (usually provided by ubuntu packages) to be installed. After this step the executable(s) of this specific application you are trying to install will be created.
sudo make install
moves all the needed for the application files to the appropriate system directories. This has to be done after make
because the executables of the application have been created and can be moved to the appropriate system directory (e.g. /usr/bin/) for later use.
Libraries are necessary, because they allow a programmer to use code made by other people to achieve certain things. i.e. if I wanted to do some disk formatting in my program, I could use the libs someone already wrote to do the formatting, and I just have to make my program call those libraries. If that person finds an issue in their library, they can fix it, and it will fix it in my program too. This is how open-source software can be written so fast and be so stable.
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Doern
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Doern almost 2 years
What does
./configure
do? Whymake
thenmake install
? How does it know wherelibs
are? ( they are all there and loaded but it cant find them.) Why needlibs
if compiler is supposed to compile? -
reverendj1 almost 12 yearsI just wanted to clarify. Many non-programmers would not understand. You can remove it if you do not feel it adds anything. :-)