Why always ./configure; make; make install; as 3 separate steps?

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Because each step does different things

Prepare(setup) environment for building

./configure

This script has lots of options that you should change. Like --prefix or --with-dir=/foo. That means every system has a different configuration. Also ./configure checks for missing libraries that should be installed. Anything wrong here causes not to build your application. That’s why distros have packages that are installed on different places, because every distro thinks it’s better to install certain libraries and files to certain directories. It is said to run ./configure, but in fact you should change it always.

For example have a look at the Arch Linux packages site. Here you’ll see that any package uses a different configure parameter (assume they are using autotools for the build system).

Building the system

make

This is actually make all by default. And every make has different actions to do. Some do building, some do tests after building, some do checkout from external SCM repositories. Usually you don’t have to give any parameters, but again some packages execute them differently.

Install to the system

make install

This installs the package in the place specified with configure. If you want you can specify ./configure to point to your home directory. However, lots of configure options are pointing to /usr or /usr/local. That means then you have to use actually sudo make install because only root can copy files to /usr and /usr/local.

Now you see that each step is a pre-requirement for next step. Each step is a preparation to make things work in a problemless flow. Distros use this metaphor to build packages (like RPM, deb, etc.).

Here you’ll see that each step is actually a different state. That’s why package managers have different wrappers. Below is an example of a wrapper that lets you build the whole package in one step. But remember that each application has a different wrapper (actually these wrappers have a name like spec, PKGBUILD, etc.):

def setup:
... #use ./configure if autotools is used

def build:
... #use make if autotools is used

def install:
... #use make all if autotools is used

Here one can use autotools, that means ./configure, make and make install. But another one can use SCons, Python related setup or something different.

As you see splitting each state makes things much easier for maintaining and deployment, especially for package maintainers and distros.

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