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